
Book ■ ^ y 

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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 
ROBERT BROIFNING 



JT^^^ 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



ROBERT BROWNING 



BY 



G. K. CHESTERTON 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1903 

Ail rights reserved 



4V 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 


Two Copies 


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MAY 16 


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Entry 
XXc, No 


COPY 


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COPYEIQHT, 1903, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrgtyped February, 1903. 



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J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTEK I 

PAGE 

Browning in Early Life 1 

CHAPTER n 
Early Works 31 

CHAPTER in 
Browning and His Marriage 55 

CHAPTER IV 
Browning in Italy 81 

CHAPTER V 
Browning in Later Life o 105 

CHAPTER VI 
Browning as a Literary Artist 133 

CHAPTER VII 
The Bing and the Book 160 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Philosophy of Browning 177 

Index 203 

V 



ROBERT BROWNING 

CHAPTER I 

BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 

On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things 
have been said and remain to be said ; of his life, con- 
sidered as a narrative of facts, there is little or nothing 
to say. It was a lucid and public and yet quiet life, 
which culminated in one gr^'at dramatic test of char- 
acter, and then fell back again into this union of 
quietude and publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it 
is a great deal more difficult to speak finally about his 
life than about his work. His work has the mystery 
which belongs to the complex ; his life the much greater 
mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever 
enough to understand his own poetry; and if he 
understood it, we can understand it. But he was also 
entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was never 
clever enough to understand his own character; con- 
sequently we may be excused if that part of him which 
was hidden from him is partly hidden from us. The 
subtle man is always immeasurably easier to understand 
than the natural man ; for the subtle man keeps a diary 
of his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and 
self-revelation, and can tell us how he came to feel this 

B 1 



2 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

or to say that. But a man like Browning knows 
no more about the state of his emotions than about 
the state of his pulse ; they are things greater than he, 
things growing at will, like forces of Nature. There 
is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes 
how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning asking him 
for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and 
received the following reply : ^' When that poem was 
written, two people knew what it meant — God and 
Robert Browning. And now God only knows what 
it means." This story gives, in all probability, an en- 
tirely false impression of Browning's attitude towards 
his work. He was a keen artist, a keen scholar, he 
could put his finger on anything, and he had a memory 
like the British Museum Library. But the story does, 
in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of 
. Browning's attitude towards his own emotions and 
his psychological type. If a man had asked him what 
some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he 
could in all probability have quoted half the epic ; if a 
man had asked him which third cousin of Charlemagne 
was alluded to in Sordello, he could have given an 
account of the man and an account of his father and. 
his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what 
he thought of _ himself, or what were his emotions an 
hour before his wedding, he would have replied with 
perfect sincerity that God alone knew. 

This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper 
than any mystery of the conscious one, existing as it 
does in all men, existed peculiarly in Browning, because 
he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The 
same thing exists to some extent in all history and all 
affairs. Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created 



I.] BROWNING IN EAKLY LIFE 3 

as a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last ; 
everything that is done naturally remains mysterious. 
It may be difficult to discover the principles of the 
E/Osicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the prin- 
ciples of the Rosicrucians than the principles of the 
United States : nor has any secret society kept its aims 
so quiet as humanity. The way to be inexplicable is 
to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality of 
Browning's life ; there is the same difference between 
judging of his poetry and judging of his life, that there 
is between making a map of a labyrinth and making 
a map of a mist. The discussion of what some par- 
ticular allusion in Sordello means has gone on so far, 
and may go on still, but it has it in its nature to end. 
The life of Robert Browning, who combines the greatest 
brain with the most simple temperament known in our 
annals, would go on for ever if we did not decide to 
summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative. 

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 
7th, 1812. His father and grandfather had been clerks 
in the Bank of England, and his whole family would 
appear to have belonged to the solid and educated 
middle class — the class which is interested in letters, 
but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry 
is a luxury, but not a necessity. 

This actual quality and character of the Browning 
family shows some tendency to be obscured by matters 
more remote. It is the custom of all biographers to 
seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant ages 
and even in distant lands ; and Browning, as it happens, 
has given them opportunities which tend to lead away 
the mind from the main matter in hand. There is a 



4 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

tradition, for example, that men of his name were prom- 
inent in the feudal ages ; it is based upon little beyond 
a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning 
used a seal with a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle- 
class men use such a seal, merely because it is a curiosity 
or a legacy, without knowing or caring anything about 
the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. 
Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish 
blood; a view which is perfectly conceivable, and 
which Browning would have been the last to have 
thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, 
there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason 
assigned by his contemporaries for the belief was the 
fact that he was, without doubt, specially and pro- 
foundly interested in Jewish matters. This suggestion, 
worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other 
way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic 
about England, or indignant against England, it never 
occurred to any living Englishman to be interested in 
England. Browning was, like every other intelligent 
Aryan, interested in the Jews ; but if he was related 
to every people in which he was interested, he must 
have been of extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, 
there is the yet more sensational theory that there was 
in Robert Browning a strain of the negro. The sup- 
porters of this hypothesis seem to have little in real- 
ity to say, except that Browning's grandmother was 
certainly a Creole. It is said in support of the view 
that Browning was singularly dark in early life, and 
was often mistaken for an Italian. There does not, 
however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced 
from this, except that if he looked like an Italian, he 
must have looked exceedingly unlike a negro. 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 6 

There is nothing valid against any of these three 
theories, just as there is nothing valid in their favour ; 
they may, any or all of them, be true, but they are 
still irrelevant. They are something that is in history 
or biography a great deal worse than being false — they 
are misleading. We do not want to know about a man 
like Browning, whether he had a right to a shield used 
in the Wars of the Eoses, or whether the tenth grand- 
father of his Creole grandmother had been white or 
black : we want to know something about his family, 
which is quite a different thing. We wish to have 
about Browning not so much the kind of information 
which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the 
sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were 
advertising for a very confidential secretary, or a very 
private tutor. We should not be concerned as to 
whether the tutor were descended from an Irish king, 
but we should still be really concerned about his extrac- 
tion, about what manner of people his had been for the 
last two or three generations. This is the most practi- 
cal duty of biography, and this is also the most difficult. 
It is a great deal easier to hunt a family from tomb- 
stone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than 
to catch and realise and put upon paper that most 
nameless and elusive of all things — social tone. 

It will be said immediately, and must as promptly 
be admitted, that we could find a biographical signi- 
ficance in any of these theories if we looked for it. 
But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers that 
they tend to see significance in everything ; characteris- 
tic carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and charac- 
teristic carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, 
assuredly, that all the three races above named could be 



6 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

connected with Browning^ s personality. If we believed, 
for instance, that he really came of a race of mediaeval 
barons,- we should say at once that from them he got 
his pre-eminent spirit of battle : we should be right, for 
every line in his stubborn soul and his erect body did 
really express the fighter ; he was always contending, 
whether it was with a German theory about the 
Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a 
crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, 
we should point out how absorbed he was in the 
terrible simplicity of monotheism : we should be right, 
for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of 
the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to 
suggest a love of colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a 
pleasure 

*' When reds and blues were indeed red and blue," 

as he says in Tlie Ring and the Book. We should 
be right ; for there really was in Browning a tropical 
violence of taste, an artistic scheme compounded as it 
were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid our cold 
English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is 
extremely fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has 
above been suggested, here comes in the great temp- 
tation of this kind of work, the noble temptation to 
see too much in everything. The biographer can easily 
see a personal significance in these three hypothetical 
nationalities. But is there in the world a biographer 
who could lay his hand upon his heart and say that he 
would not have seen as much significance in any three 
other nationalities ? If Browning's ancestors had been 
Frenchmen, should we not have said thai it was from 
them doubtless that he inherited that logical agility 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 7 

which marks him among English poets ? If his grand- 
father had been a Swede, should we not have said that 
the old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation 
and insatiable travel ? If his great-aunt had been a 
Red Indian, should we not have said that only in the 
Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the Browning 
fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism ? 
This over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part 
of that secret hero-worship which is the heart of 
biography. The lover of great men sees signs of them 
long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, 
like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their 
heralds the storms and the falling stars. 

A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to 
the present writer if he declines to follow that admi- 
rable veteran of Browning study. Dr. Furnivall, into the 
prodigious investigations which he has been conducting 
into the condition of the Browning family since the 
beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the 
descent of Browning from a footman in the service of a 
country magnate, there seems to be suggestive, though 
not decisive, evidence. But Browning's descent from 
barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the 
main point touching his family. If the Brownings 
were of mixed origin, they were so much the more like 
the great majority of English middle-class people. It 
is curious that the romance of race should be spoken of 
as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic ; that admi- 
ration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only 
interest in one not very interesting type of rank and 
family. The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the 
romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. 
For since it is their principle to marry only within their 



8 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in 
their case for any of the more interesting studies in 
heredity ; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity 
of the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that 
we find the poetry of genealogy ; it is the suburban 
grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash 
of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a 
whole holiday or a crime. Let us admit then, that it is 
true that these legends of the Browning family have 
every abstract possibility. But it is a far more cogent 
and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the 
door of every house in the street where Browning was 
born, he would have found similar legends in all of 
them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell that 
has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few 
generations back ; and in all this the Brownings are 
simply a typical Camberwell family. The real truth 
about Browning and men like him can scarcely be 
better expressed than in the words of that very 
wise and witty story, Kingsley's Water Babies, in which 
the pedigree of the Professor is treated in a manner 
which is an excellent example of the wild common 
sense of the book. " His mother was a Dutch woman, 
and therefore she was born at Curacoa (of course, you 
have read your geography and therefore know why), 
and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was brought 
up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your 
modern politics, and therefore know why), but for 
all that he was as thorough an Englishman as ever 
coveted his neighbour's goods." 

It may be well therefore to abandon the task of 
obtaining a clear account of Browning's family, and 
endeavour to obtain, what is much more important, a 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 9 

clear account of his home. For the great central and 
solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend in- 
evitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a 
thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class. 
He may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by 
the paradox we have observed, may have made him 
more characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a 
metaphor may or may not have been born of eastern 
or southern elements, but he was, without any question 
at all, an Englishman of the middle class. Neither all 
his liberality nor all his learning ever made him any- 
thing but an Englishman of the middle class. He 
expanded his intellectual tolerance until it included 
the anarchism of Fifine at the Fair and the blasphe- 
mous theology of Caliban ; but he remained himself 
an Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all 
the passions of the earth since the Fall, from the de- 
vouring amorousness of Timers Revenges to the des- 
potic fantasy of Instans Tyrannus ; but he remained 
himself an Englishman of the middle class. The mo- 
ment that he came in contact with anything that was 
slovenly, anything that was lawless, in actual life, 
something rose up in him, older than any opinions, the 
blood of generations of good men. He met George 
Sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the 
hatred of an old city merchant for the irresponsible 
life. He met the Spiritualists and hated them, with 
all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and 
equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect 
went upon bewildering voyages, but his soul walked 
in a straight road. He piled up the fantastic towers 
of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets ; but 
the plan of the foundation on which he built was 



10 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

always the plan of an honest English house in Camber- 
well. He abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual am- 
bition, every one of the convictions of his class ; but 
he carried its prejudices into eternity. 

It is then of Browning as a member of the middle 
class, that we can speak with the greatest historical 
certainty; and it is his immediate forebears who present 
the real interest to us. His father, Eobert Browning, 
was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appear- 
ance of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. 
Every glimpse we have of him suggests that earnest 
and almost worried kindliness which is the mark of 
those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, 
is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life 
Robert Browning senior was placed by his father (who 
was apparently a father of a somewhat primitive, not to 
say barbaric, type) in an important commercial position 
in the West Indies. He threw up the position however, 
because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. 
Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, 
not only disinherited him and flung him out of doors, 
but by a superb stroke of humour, which stands alone 
in the records of parental ingenuity, sent him in a bill 
for the cost of his education. About the same time 
that he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was 
also disturbed about religious matters, and he completed 
his severance from his father by joining a dissenting 
sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of the 
serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a 
man to whom duty was all in all, and who would revo- 
lutionise an empire or a continent for the satisfaction 
of a single moral scruple. Thus, while he was Puritan 
at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the seventeenth, 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 11 

but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth, cen- 
tury, he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces 
of a man of culture. Numerous accomplishments of 
the lighter kind, such as drawing and painting in water 
colours, he possessed ; and his feeling for many kinds 
of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole 
was absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the 
eighteenth century. He lamented his son's early ad- 
miration for Byron, and never ceased adjuring him to 
model himself upon Pope. 

He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humani- 
tarians of the eighteenth century, a class which we 
may or may not have conquered in moral theory, but 
which we most certainly have not conquered in moral 
practice. Eobert Browning senior destroyed all his 
fortunes in order to protest against black slavery; 
white slavery may be, as later economists tell us, a 
thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy 
their fortunes in order to protest against it. The 
ideals of the men of that period appear to us very un- 
attractive ; to them duty was a kind of chilly sentiment. 
But when we think what they did with those cold ideals, 
we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the 
enormous Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as 
old as the race of man. They altered the whole face of 
Europe with their deductive fancies. We have ideals 
that are really better, ideals of passion, of mysticism, 
of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the 
earth ; but it will be well for us if we achieve as 
much by our frenzy as they did by their delicacies. It 
scarcely seems as if we were as robust in our very 
robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. 

Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of 



12 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

William Wiedermann, a German merchant settled in 
Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One of the 
poet's principal biographers has suggested that from 
this union of the German and Scotch, Browning got 
his metaphysical tendency; it is possible; but here 
again we must beware of the great biographical danger 
of making mountains out of molehills. What Brown- 
ing's mother unquestionably did give to him, was in 
the way of training — a very strong religious habit, and 
a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle called her 
" the type of a Scottish gentlewoman,'' and the phrase 
has a very real significance to those who realise the 
peculiar condition of Scotland, one of the very few 
European countries where large sections of the aris- 
tocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman 
combines two descriptions of dignity at the same 
time. Little more is known of this lady except the 
fact that after her death Browning could not bear to 
look at places where she had walked. 

Browning's education in the formal sense reduces 
itself to a minimum. In very early boyhood he at- 
tended a species of dame-school, which, according to 
some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave 
because he was too clever to be tolerable. However 
this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a 
school kept by Mr. Eeady, at which again he was 
marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education 
did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of 
education ; it took place in his own home, where one of 
the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indul- 
gent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic 
recitals from the Greek epics and mediaeval chronicles. 
If we test the matter by the test of actual schools and 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 13 

universities, Browning will appear to be almost the 
least educated man in English literary history. But 
if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall 
think that he was perhaps the most educated man that 
ever lived ; that he was in fact, if anything, over-edu- 
cated. In a spirited poem he has himself described 
how, when he was a small child, his father used to 
pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the 
city of Troy. Browning came out of the home crammed 
with all kinds of knowledge — knowledge about the 
Greek poets, knowledge about the Provengal Trouba- 
dours, knowledge about the Jewish Kabbis of the 
Middle Ages. But along with all this knowledge he 
carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, 
an ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge 
was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious 
child, taught to regard himself as clever. In the 
atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure, 
and a natural pleasure, like sport or wine. He had 
in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Eenascence, 
when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of 
spring. He had no reason to suppose that every one 
did not join, in so admirable a game. His sagacious 
destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, 
left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. 

Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace re- 
mains, except a kind of diary which contains under 
one date the laconic statement, ^^ Married two wives 
this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer 
would be quite capable of seeing in this a most sugges- 
tive foreshadowing of the sexual dualism which is so 
ably defended in Fifine at the Fair. A great part of 
his childhood was passed in the society of his only 



14 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact 
that with her also he passed his last days. From his 
earliest babyhood he seems to have lived in a more or 
less stimulating mental atmosphere ; but as he emerged 
into youth he came under great poetic influences, which 
made his father's classical poetic tradition look for the 
time insipid : Browning began to live in the life of his 
own age. 

As a young man he attended classes at University 
College ; beyond this there is little evidence that he was 
much in touch with intellectual circles outside that of 
his own family. But the forces that were moving the 
literary world had long passed beyond the merely liter- 
ary area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very 
subtle and profound change was beginning in the intel- 
lectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brown- 
ings. In studying the careers of great men we tend 
constantly to forget that their youth was generally 
passed and their characters practically formed in a 
period long previous to their appearance in history. 
We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, and for- 
get that he grew up in the living shadow of Shake- 
speare and the full summer of the Elizabethan drama. 
We realise Garibaldi as a sudden and almost miracu- 
lous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the 
new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must 
have formed his first ideas of liberty while hearing at 
his father's dinner-table that Napoleon was the master 
of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as the 
great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have 
opinions on Mr. Gladstone's Home Eule Bill, and for- 
get that as a young man he passed a bookstall and saw 
a volume ticketed " Mr. Shelley's Atheistic Poem," and 



I.] BKOWNING IN EARLY LIFE 15 

had to search, even in his own really cultivated circle 
for some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. 
Browning was, in short, born in the afterglow of the 
great Revolution. 

The French Ee volution was at root a thoroughly 
optimistic thing. It may seem strange to attribute 
optimism to anything so destructive; but, in truth, 
this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by 
its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of 
the whole of that period, the period before, during, and 
long after the Eevolution, is the idea that man would 
by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty, and 
love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keep- 
ing him out of that Eden. No one can do the least 
justice to the great Jacobins who does not realise 
that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was like 
breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as 
for more than a century great men had dreamed of 
this beautiful emancipation, so the dream began in 
the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among 
the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of 
society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the 
young of the middle classes, which had nothing at all 
in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt 
against all things in heaven or earth, which has been 
fashionable among the young in more recent times. 
The Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side 
of existence; he thought that every cloud and clump 
of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He 
represented, in short, a revolt of the normal against 
the abnormal ; he found himself, so to speak, in the 
heart of a wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state 
of things, in which God was rebelling against Satan. 



16 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

There began to arise about this time a race of young 
men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated 
middle class, and even of classes lower, who felt in 
a hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal 
things against temporal and practical ones, and who 
lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind 
of furtive universalist ; they had discovered the whole 
cosmos, and they kept the whole cosmos a secret. 
They climbed up dark stairs to meagre garrets, and 
shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the 
great men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian 
era, were at this time living in mean streets in mag- 
nificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly visiting his 
solemn suburban aunts ; Dickens was going to and fro 
in a blacking factory ; Carlyle, slightly older, was still 
lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had 
not long become the assistant of the country surgeon 
when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all 
sides there was the first beginning of the aesthetic stir 
in the middle classes which expressed itself in the com- 
bination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic 
livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office-boys. 

Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of 
Shelley and Keats, in the atmosphere of literary youth, 
fierce and beautiful, among new poets who believed 
in a new world. It is important to remember this, 
because the real Browning was a quite different person 
from the grim moralist and metaphysician who is seen 
through the spectacles of Browning Societies and 
University Extension Lecturers. Browning was first 
and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things 
visible and invisible, a priest of the higher passions. 
The misunderstanding that has supposed him to be 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 17 

other than poetical, because his form was often fanci- 
ful and abrupt, is really different from the misunder- 
standing which attaches to most other poets. The 
opponents of Victor Hugo called him a mere windbag; 
the opponents of Shakespeare called him a buffoon. 
But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least 
knew better. Now the admirers and opponents of 
Browning alike make him out to be a pedant rather 
than a poet. The only difference between the Brown- 
ingite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says 
he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first 
says he was a philosopher and not a mere poet. The 
admirer disparages poetry in order to exalt Browning ; 
the opponent exalts poetry in order to disparage Brown- 
ing ; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry 
above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted 
intensity, and stands among the few poets who hardly 
wrote a line of anything else. 

The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert 
Browning has as much the quality of pure poetry as 
the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not find in 
it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed 
in by learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed 
would such sympathisers feel if informed that the 
first poems that Browning wrote in a volume called 
Incondita were noticed to contain the fault of "too 
much splendour of language and too little wealth of 
thought " ? They were indeed Byronic in the extreme, 
and Browning in his earlier appearances in society pre- 
sents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, 
the actor, wrote of him : "He looks and speaks more 
like a young poet than any one I have ever seen." A 
picturesque tradition remains that Thomas Carlyle, 



18 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated 
by his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom 
he described as a strangely beautiful youth/who poured 
out to him without preface or apology his admiration 
for the great philosopher's works. Browning at this 
time seems to have left upon many people this im- 
pression of physical charm. A friend who attended 
University College with him says: "He was then a 
bright handsome youth with long black hair falling 
over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him 
in connection with this period asserts and reasserts the 
completely romantic spirit by which he was then 
possessed. He was fond, for example, of following in 
the track of gipsy caravans, far across country, and a 
song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the 
Queen of the Gipsies oh ! '' rang in his ears long enough 
to express itself in his soberer and later days in that 
splendid poem of the spirit of escape and Bohemian- 
ism, Tlie Flight of the Duchess. Such other of these 
early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as strid- 
ing across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing 
in the wind, reciting aloud passages from Isaiah, or 
climbing up into the elms above Norwood to look 
over London by night. It was when looking down 
from that suburban eyrie over the whole confounding 
labyrinth of Loudon that he was filled with that great 
irresponsible benevolence which is the best of the joys 
of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly irre- 
sponsible benevolence in the first plan of Pippa Passes, 
At the end of his father's garden was a laburnum 
" heavy with its weight of gold," and in the tree two 
nightingales were in the habit of singing against each 
other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 19 

become less common in Cambenvell. When Browning 
as a boy was intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley 
and Keats, he hypnotised himself into something 
approaching to a positive conviction that these two 
birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had 
settled in a Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the 
only young gentleman who really adored and under- 
stood them. This last story is perhaps the most typical 
of the tone common to all the rest ; it would be diffi- 
cult to find a story which across the gulf of nearly 
eighty years awakens so vividly a sense of the sump- 
tuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. With Brown- 
ing, as with all true poets, passion came first and made 
intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making 
literature as the hunger for bread made a plough. The 
life he lived in those early days was no life of dull 
application; there was no poet whose youth was so 
young. When he was full of years and fame, and 
delineating in great epics the beauty and horror of the 
romance of southern Europe, a young man, thinking 
to please him, said, " There is no romance now except 
in Italy. ^^ "W^ell," said Browning, "I should make 
an exception of Camberwell.^^ 

Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of 
essential issue that there was in the nature of things 
between the generation of Browning and the genera- 
tion of his father. Browning was bound in the nature 
of things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism 
was not, of course, in reality so much a pessimism about 
civilised things as an optimism about savage things. 
This great revolt on behalf of the elemental which 
Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all to 
occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, 



20 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

and Eobert Browning senior had to go back to his 
water colours and the faultless couplets of Pope with 
the full sense of the greatest pathos that the world 
contains, the pathos of the man who has produced 
something that he cannot understand. 

The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without 
exception, to this ardent and somewhat sentimental 
evolution. Pauline appeared anonymously in 1833. 
It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, 
the general suggestion that the author is a thousand 
years old. Browning calls it a fragment of a confes- 
sion; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an old friend of Browning's 
father, who reviewed it for TaWs Magazine, said, with 
truth, that it would be difficult to find anything more 
purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a 
boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity 
and moral waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the 
fact that every one else has committed them. It is 
wholesome and natural for youth to go about confessing 
that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest 
hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the 
records of that particular period of development, even 
when they are as ornate and beautiful as Pauline^ are 
not necessarily or invariably wholesome reading. The 
chief interest of Pauline^ with all its beauties, lies in 
a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that 
Browning, of all people, should have signalised his 
entrance into the world of letters with a poem which 
may fairly be called morbid. But this is a morbidity 
so general and recurrent that it may be called in a 
contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity ; it is a kind 
of intellectual measles. No one of any degree of 
maturity in reading Pauline will be quite so horrified 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 21 

at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the story 
as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that 
bitter and heartrending period of youth which comes 
before we realise the one grand and logical basis of 
all optimism — the doctrine of original sin. The boy 
at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, 
regards all his faults as frightful secret malformations, 
and it is only later that he becomes conscious of that 
large and beautiful and benignant explanation that the 
heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately 
wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own 
work was one of the best in the world, took this view 
of Pauline in after years is quite obvious. He displayed 
a very manly and unique capacity of really laughing at 
his own work without being in the least ashamed of it. 
^^This," he said of Pauline, "is the only crab apple 
that remains of the shapely tree of life in my fooPs 
paradise." It would be difficult to express the matter 
more perfectly. Although Pa^iline was published 
anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain 
circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the 
literary world. Tie had already become acquainted with 
two of the best friends he was ever destined to have, 
Alfred Domett, celebrated in " The Guardian Angel " 
and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death 
is spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the 
English language. Browning's " May and Death." These 
were men of his own age, and his manner of speaking 
of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid 
world of comradeship which Plato and Walt Whitman 
knew, with its endless days and its immortal nights. 
Browning had a third friend destined to play an even 
greater part in his life, but who belonged to an older 



22 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

generation and a statelier school of manners and 
scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of 
Browning's father, and occupied towards his son some- 
thing of the position of an irresponsible uncle. He 
was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and 
the courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, 
though much for himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after 
years wrote of ^' the brightness of his carved speech," 
which would appear to suggest that he practised that 
urbane and precise order of wit which was even then 
old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of 
this kind, he was not so much an able man as the 
natural friend and equal of able men. 

Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about 
this time in all directions. One friend in particular he 
made, the Comte de Eipert-Monclar, a French Royalist 
with whom he prosecuted with renewed energy his 
studies in the mediaeval and Renaissance schools of 
philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that 
Browning should write a poetical play on the subject 
of Paracelsus. After reflection, indeed, the Count re- 
tracted this advice on the ground that the history of 
the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed 
by this terrible deficiency. Browning caught up the 
idea with characteristic enthusiasm, and in 1835 ap- 
peared the first of his works which he himself regarded 
as representative — Paracdsus, The poem shows an 
enormous advance in technical literary power ; but in 
the history of Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting 
as giving an example of a peculiarity which clung to 
him during the whole of his literary life, an intense 
love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two 
years afterwards he wrote Parleyiiigs with certain Per- 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 2S 

sons of Importance in their Day, the last poem published 
in his lifetime ; and any reader of that remarkable 
work will perceive that the common characteristic of all 
these persons is not so much that they were of impor- 
tance in their day as that they are of no importance in 
ours. The same eccentric fastidiousness worked in him 
as a young man when he wrote Paracelsus and Sordello. 
Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find any very 
exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the 
favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written 
about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, 
but he has written nothing about Socrates or Caesar or 
Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or 
Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political 
ambition he selects that entirely unknown individual. 
King Victor of Sardinia. When he wishes to express 
the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some 
extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master 
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express 
the largest and sublimes t scheme of morals and religion 
which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it 
into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of 
mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Eabbi 
of the name of Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance 
with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes 
to study the deification of the intellect and the dis- 
interested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does 
not select any of the great philosophers from Plato to 
Darwin, whose investigations are still of some impor- 
tance in the eyes of the world. He selects the figure 
of all figures most covered with modern satire and 
pity, a priori the scientist of the Middle Ages and the 
Eenaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect 



24 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the 
alchemist. It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind 
constituting a more complete challenge to the ordi- 
nary modern point of view. To the intellect of our 
time the wild investigators of the school of Paracel- 
sus seem to be the very crown and flower of futil- 
ity, they are collectors of straws and careful misers 
of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any 
critic who understands the true spirit of mediaeval 
science can see that he was right; no critic can see 
how right he was unless he understands the spirit of 
mediaeval science as thoroughly as he did. In the 
character of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the 
dangers and disappointments which attend the man 
who believes merely in the intellect. He wished to 
depict the fall of the logician ; and with a perfect and 
unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and 
spoke in the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most 
thoroughly and even painfully logical period that the 
world has ever seen. If he had chosen an ancient 
Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the 
critic to have said that that philosopher relied to 
some extent upon the most sunny and graceful social 
life that ever flourished. If he had made him a mod- 
ern sociological professor, it would have been possible 
to object that his energies were not wholly concerned 
with truth, but partly with the solid and material 
satisfaction of society. But the man truly devoted 
to the things of the mind was the mediaeval magi- 
cian. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation 
does not satisfy itself by calling another civilisation 
wicked — it calls it uncivilised. We call the Chinese 
barbarians, and they call us barbarians. The mediaeval 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 25 

state, like China, was a foreign civilisation, and this 
was its supreme characteristic, that it cared for the 
things of the mind for their own sake. To complain 
of the researches of its sages on the ground that they 
were not materially fruitful, is to act as we should 
act in telling a gardener that his roses were not as 
digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that 
the mediaeval philosophers never discovered the steam- 
engine ; it is quite equally true that they never tried. 
The Eden of the Middle Ages was really a garden, 
where each of God's flowers — truth and beauty and rea- 
son — flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. 
The Eden of modern progress is a kitchen garden. 

It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to 
have chosen a better example for his study of intellec- 
tual egotism than Paracelsus. Modern life accuses the 
mediaeval tradition of crushing the intellect; Brown- 
ing, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of 
over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even 
more important deduction to be made from the moral 
of Paracelsus. The usual accusation against Browning 
is that he was consumed with logic ; that he thought all 
subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual dis- 
quisition ; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of 
plucking knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two ; 
and that to this method he sacrificed deliberately, and 
with complete self-complacency, the element of poetry 
and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to 
have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is 
only one answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact 
that he wrote a play designed to destroy the whole of 
this intellectualist fallacy at the age of twenty-three. 

Paracelsus was in all likelihood Browning's intro- 



26 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

duction to the literary world. It was many years, 
and even many decades, before he had anything like 
a public appreciation, but a very great part of the 
minority of those who were destined to appreciate him 
came over to his standard upon the publication of 
Paracelsus. The celebrated John Forster had taken 
up Paracelsus " as a thing to slate,'^ and had ended its 
perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author 
and his works. John Stuart Mill, never backward in 
generosity, had already interested himself in Browning, 
and was finally converted by the same poem. Among 
other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Home, 
Serjeant Talfourd, and Monckton Milnes. One man 
of even greater literary stature seems to have come 
into Browning's life about this time, a man for whom 
he never ceased to have the warmest affection and 
trust. Browning was, indeed, one of the very few 
men of that period who got on perfectly with Thomas 
Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little things which 
speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good 
humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless 
contempt for most other poets of his day, had some- 
thing amounting to a real attachment to him. He 
would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of 
dining with him. Browning, on the other hand, with 
characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and 
justified Carlyle in all companies. ^^I have just seen 
dear Carlyle,'' he writes on one occasion; "catch me 
calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter 
beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed 
question of the Carlyle domestic relations, and his 
impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she was " a hard 
unlovable woman." As, however^ it is on record that 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 27 

he once, while excitedly explaining some point of 
mystical philosophy, put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot 
kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity that he may 
have observed in her manner may possibly find a 
natural explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle 
affair, which was characteristically headlong and hu- 
man, may not throw much light on that painful prob- 
lem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on the 
character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud 
of its friends, and had what may almost be called a 
lust of loyalty. Browning was not capable of that most 
sagacious detachment which enabled Tennyson to say 
that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never 
to have married, since if they had each married else- 
where there would have been four miserable people 
instead of two. 

Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which 
Browning had now begun to mingle, there was no 
figure more eccentric and spontaneous than that of 
Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a 
man living from hand to mouth in all things spiritual 
and pecuniary, a man feeding upon flying emotions, 
conceived something like an attraction towards 
Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young 
poet, and in a moment of peculiar excitement sug- 
gested to him the writing of a great play. Browning 
was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and 
prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily 
infected as Macready. He immediately began to plan 
out a great historical play, and selected for his subject 
" Strafford.'^ 

In Browning's treatment of the subject there is some- 
thing more than a trace of his Puritan and Liberal 



28 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

upbringing. It is one of the very earliest of the 
really important works in English literature which are 
based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents 
of the time of Charles I. It is true that the finest 
element in the play is the opposition between Strafford 
and Pym, an opposition so complete, so lucid, so con- 
sistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the friendly 
openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. 
The two men love each other and fight each other, and 
do the two things at the same time completely. This 
is a great thing of which even to attempt the descrip- 
tion. It is easy to have the impartiality which can 
speak judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy 
to have that larger and higher impartiality which can 
speak passionately on behalf of both parties. Never- 
theless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is 
in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan 
education and Puritan historical outlook. 

For Strafford is, of course, an example of that most 
difficult of all literary works — a political play. The 
thing has been achieved once at least admirably in 
Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar, and something like it, 
though from a more one-sided and romantic stand- 
point, has been done excellently in UAiglon, But 
the difficulties of such a play are obvious on the face 
of the matter. In a political play the principal char- 
acters are not merely men. They are symbols, arith- 
metical figures representing millions of other men 
outside. It is, by dint of elaborate stage management, 
possible to bring a mob upon the boards, but the 
largest mob ever known is nothing but a floating 
atom of the people; and the people of which the 
politician has to think does not consist of knots of 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 29 

rioters in the street, but of some million absolutely 
distinct individuals, each sitting in his own break- 
fast room reading his own morning paper. To 
give even the faintest suggestion of the strength 
and size of the people in this sense in the course 
of a dramatic performance is obviously impossi- 
ble. That is why it is so easy on the stage to 
concentrate all the pathos and dignity upon such 
persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, the 
vampires of their people, because within the minute 
limits of a stage there is room for their small virtues 
and no room for their enormous crimes. It would be 
impossible to find a stronger example than the case 
of Strafford. It is clear that no one could possibly 
tell the whole truth about the life and death of Straf- 
ford, politically considered, in a play. Strafford was 
one of the greatest men ever born in England, and he 
attempted to found a great English official despotism. 
That is to say, he attempted to found something which 
is so different from what has actually come about that 
we can in reality scarcely judge of it, any more than 
we can judge whether it would be better to live in 
another planet, or pleasanter to have been born a dog 
or an elephant. It would require enormous imagina- 
tion to reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. 
Now Browning, as we all know, got over the matter in 
his play, by practically denying that Strafford had any 
political ideals at all. That is to say, while crediting 
Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and 
character, he makes the whole of his political action 
dependent upon his passionate personal attachment to 
the King. This is unsatisfactory; it is in reality a 
dodging of the great difficulty of the political play. 



30 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

That difficulty, in the case of any political problem, 
is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, 
for example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's 
Home Eule Bill. It would be almost impossible to 
get expressed in a drama of some five acts and some 
twenty characters anything so ancient and compli- 
cated as that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in 
the darkness of the age of Strongbow, and the branches 
of which spread out to the remotest commonwealths 
of the East and West. But we should scarcely be 
satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by 
ascribing Mr. Gladstone's action in the Home Eule 
question to an overwhelming personal affection for 
Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's action 
upon personal and private reasons. Browning certainly 
does some injustice to the political greatness of Straf- 
ford. To attribute Mr. Gladstone's conversion to Home 
Eule to an infatuation such as that suggested above, 
would certainly have the air of implying that the 
writer thought the Home Eule doctrine a peculiar or 
untenable one. Similarly, Browning's choice of a 
motive for Strafford has very much the air of an as- 
sumption that there was nothing to be said on public 
grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is 
certainly not the case. The Puritans in the great 
struggles of the reign of Charles I. may have possessed 
more valuable ideals than the Eoyalists, but it is a 
very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more 
idealistic. In Browning's play Pym is made almost 
the incarnation of public spirit, and Strafford of pri- 
vate ties. But not only may an upholder of despotism 
be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent up- 
holders of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism 



I.] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 31 

indeedj and attempts at despotism, like that of Straf- 
ford, are a kind of disease of public spirit. They rep- 
resent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. 
It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love 
for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the 
difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back 
upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves. 
Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment 
with mankind. They are in that most dreadful posi- 
tion, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs — 
the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost 
love. This belief that all would go right if we could 
only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy al- 
most without exception, but nobody can justly say that 
it is not public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despot- 
ism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves 
them too much and trusts them too little. Therefore 
from age to age in history arise these great despotic 
dreamers, whether they be Eoyalists or Imperialists 
or even Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the 
world would enter into rest if it went their way and 
forswore altogether the right of going its own way. 
When a man begins to think that the grass will not 
grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he 
generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne 
of an Emperor. Of these men Strafford was one, and 
we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat narrows 
the significance and tragedy of his place in history 
by making him merely the champion of a personal 
idiosyncrasy against a great public demand. Strafford 
was something greater than this ; if indeed, when we 
come to think of it, a man can be anything greater 
than the friend of another man. But the whole 



32 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

question is interesting, because Browning, although he 
never again attacked a political drama of such palpa- 
ble importance as Strafford, could never keep politics 
altogether out of his dramatic work. King Victor and 
King Charles, which followed it, is a political play, the 
study of a despotic instinct much meaner than that of 
Strafford. Colombe^s Birthday, again, is political as 
well as romantic. Politics in its historic aspect would 
seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed 
it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the 
one thing in the world that is as intellectual as the 
Encydopcedia Britannica and as rapid as the Derby. 

One of the favourite subjects among those who like 
to conduct long controversies about Browning (and 
their name is legion) is the question of whether Brown- 
ing's plays, such as Strafford, were successes upon the 
stage. As they are never agreed about what consti- 
tutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge 
their quarrels. But the general fact is very simple ; 
such a play as Strafford was not a gigantic theatrical 
success, and nobody, it is to be presumed, ever imag- 
ined that it would be. On the other hand, it was cer- 
tainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as 
are hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a 
week or two, as many excellent plays do, and as all 
plays ought to do. Above all, the definite success which 
attended the representation of Strafford from the point 
of view of the more educated and appreciative was 
quite enough to establish Browning in a certain defi- 
nite literary position. As a classical and established 
personality he did not come into his kingdom for years 
and decades afterwards ; not, indeed, until he was near 
to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and 
eccentric personality, as a man who existed and who 



I] BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 33 

had arisen on the outskirts of literature, the world 
began to be conscious of him at this time. 

Of what he was personally at the period that he thus 
became personally apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a 
very vivid little sketch. She describes how Browning 
called at the house (he was acquainted with her father) 
and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of 
abrupt politeness if he might play on the piano. This 
touch is very characteristic of the mingled aplomb and 
unconsciousness of Browning's social manner. "He 
was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very hand- 
some, and-may I hint it? -just a trifle of a dandy, 
addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, 
quite the glass of fashion and the mould of form. But 
full of 'ambition,' eager for success, eager for fame, 
and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and 
to achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we 
can have of the Browning of these days— a quite self- 
satisfied, but not self-conscious young man; one who 
had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure roman- 
ticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy 
caravans and listen to nightingales in the wood ; a man 
whose incandescent vitality, now that it had abandoned 
gipsies and not yet immersed itself in casuistical poems, 
devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such as lemon-col- 
oured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above 
all things perfectly young and natural, professing that 
foppery which follows the fashions, and not that sillier 
and more demoralising foppery which defies them. 
Just as he walked in coolly and yet impulsively into 
a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he 
walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon 
of European literature and offered to sing. 



CHAPTEE II 

EARLY WORKS 

In 1840 Sordello was published. Its reception by the 
great majority of readers, including some of the ablest 
men of the time, was a reception of a kind probably 
unknown in the rest of literary history, a reception 
that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps 
best expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his 
wife had read Sordello with great interest, and wished 
to know whether Sordello was a man, or a city, or a 
book. Better knov/n, of course, is the story of Tenny- 
son, who said that the first line of the poem — 

*' Who will, may hear Sordello's story told," 

and the last line — 

** Who would has heard Sordello's story told," 

were the only two lines in the poem that he under- 
stood, and they were lies. 

Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of 
Sordello legends is that which is related of Douglas 
Jerrold. He was recovering from an illness ; and hav- 
ing obtained permission for the first time to read a 
little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile 
beside the bed and began Sordello, No sooner had 
he done so than he turned deadly pale, put down the 

34 



CHAP, n.] EARLY WORKS 



85 



book, and said, ''Mj God! I^m an idiot. My health 
is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand 
two consecutive lines of an English poem.'' He then 
summoned his family and silently gave the book into 
their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem ; and 
as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their 
faces, he heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. 
These stories, whether accurate or no, do undoubtedly 
represent the very peculiar reception accorded to Sor- 
dello, a reception which, as I have said, bears no re- 
semblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy 
or condemnation that had ever been accorded to a 
work of art before. There had been authors whom 
it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors 
whom it was fashionable to boast of despising; but 
with Sordello enters into literary history the Brown- 
ing of popular badinage, the author whom it is fash- 
ionable to boast of not understanding. 

Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities 
which are to be found in the poem, when it becomes 
intelligible, there is one question very relevant to the 
fame and character of Browning which is raised by 
Sordello when it is considered, as most people con- 
sider it, as hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws 
some light upon the reason of Browning^s obscurity. 
The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity is to the 
effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged 
in more and more insolently as his years and fame 
increased. There are at least two very decisive objec- 
tions to this popular explanation. In the first place, it 
must emphatically be said for Browning that in all the 
numerous records and impressions of him throughout 
his long and very public life, there is not one iota of 



36 ROBERT BROWNING [chaf. 

evidence that he was a man who was intellectually 
vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. He was 
vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, 
and even more of the physical health which he con- 
trived to bestow for a certain period upon his wife. 
From the records of his early dandyism, his flowing 
hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable 
enough that he was vain of his good looks. He was 
vain of his masculinity, his knowledge of the world, and 
he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his prejudices, even, 
it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But 
everything is against the idea that he was much in the 
habit of thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. 
In the matter of conversation, for example, some people 
who liked him found him genial, talkative, anecdotal, 
with a certain strengthening and sanative quality in his 
mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like 
him found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted Avith 
bad manners. One lady, who knew him well, said that, 
though he only met you in a crowd and made some 
commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day 
with your head up. Another lady who did not know 
him, and therefore disliked him, asked after a dinner 
party, ^' Who was that too-exuberant financier ? " These 
are the diversities of feeling about him. But they all 
agree in one point — that he did not talk cleverly, or 
try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in 
literary circles. He talked positively, he talked a great 
deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and 
aesthetic character to his speech which is almost in- 
variable in the case of the man who is vain of his 
mental superiority. When he did impress people with 
mental gymnastics, it was mostly in the form of pouring 



II.] EARLY WORKS 37 

out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole epics written by 
other people, which is the last thing that the literary- 
egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We 
have therefore to start with an enormous psychological 
improbability that Browning made his poems compli- 
cated from mere pride in his powers and contempt of 
his readers. 

There is, however, another very practical objection 
to the ordinary theory that Browning's obscurity was a 
part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual con- 
sideration. We constantly hear the statement that 
Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his 
later poems, but the statement is simply not true. 
Sordello, to the indescribable density of which he 
never afterwards even approached, was begun before 
Strafford, and was therefore the third of his works, 
and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring 
Pauline, the second. He wrote the greater part of 
it when he was twenty-four. It was in his youth, at 
the time when a man is thinking of love and publicity, 
of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this 
horror of great darkness ; and the more we study the 
matter with any knowledge of the nature of youth, the 
more we shall come to the conclusion that Browning's 
obscurity had altogether the opposite origin to that 
which is usually assigned to it. He was not unin- 
telligible because he was proud, but unintelligible be- 
cause he was humble. He was not unintelligible 
because his thoughts were vague, but because to him 
they were obvious. 

A man who is intellectually vain does not make him- 
self incomprehensible, because he is so enormously 
impressed with the difference between his readers' 



38 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

intelligence and his own that lie talks down to them 
with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet 
was ever vainer than Byron ? What poet was ever so 
magnificently lucid ? But a young man of genius who 
has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately 
explain his discoveries, because he does not think that 
they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street 
is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and 
the tailor are poets like hiniself. Browning's im- 
penetrable poetry was the natural expression of this 
beautiful optimism. Sordello was the most glorious 
compliment that has ever been paid to the -average 
man. 

In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is 
in a young author a mark of inward clarity. A man 
who is vague in his ideas does not speak obscurely, 
because his own dazed and drifting condition leads him 
to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulae 
that every one understands. No one ever found Miss 
Marie Corelli obscure, because she believes only in 
words. But if a young man really has ideas of his 
own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a 
world of his own in which there are symbols and cor- 
respondences and categories unknown to the rest of the 
world. Let us take an imaginary example. Suppose 
that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar 
idea that all forms of excitement, including religious 
excitement, were a kind of evil intoxication, he might 
say to himself continually that churches were in reality 
taverns, and this idea would become so fixed in his 
mind that he would forget that no such association 
existed in the minds of others. And suppose that in 
pursuance of this general idea, which is a perfectly 



II.] EARLY WORKS 39 

clear and intellectual idea, though a very silly one, 
he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without 
its theology, and were to repeat this idea also to him- 
self until it became instinctive and familiar, such a 
man might take up a pen, and under the impression 
that he was saying something figurative indeed, but 
quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as 
this, " You will not get the godless Puritan into your 
white taverns,'^ and no one in the length and breadth 
of the country could form the remotest notion of what 
he could mean. So it would have been in any example, 
for instance, of a man who made some philosophical 
discovery and did not realise how far the world was 
from it. If it had been possible for a poet in the 
sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as 
obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might 
have written down some such line as "the radiant 
offspring of the ape," and the maddest volumes of 
mediaeval natural history would have been ransacked 
for the meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and 
solid and sensible the idea appeared to him, the more 
dark and fantastic it would have appeared to the world. 
Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything valuable, 
say it when we are giving expression to that part of 
us which has become as familiar and invisible as the 
pattern on our wall paper. It is only when an idea 
has become a matter of course to the thinker that it 
becomes startling to the world. 

It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary 
point of the ground of Browning's obscurity, because 
it involves an important issue about him. Our whole 
view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, 
and I think absolutely false, if we start with the con- 



40 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

ception that he was what the French call an intellectual. 
If we see Browning with the eyes of his particular 
followers, we shall inevitably think this. For his 
followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there 
never lived upon the earth a great man who was so 
fundamentally different from his followers. Indeed, 
he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. 
" Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, " and I am very 
far from being a Browningite,'^ We shall, as I say, 
utterly misunderstand Browning at every step of his 
career if we suppose that he was the sort of man 
who would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the 
subtlety and abstruseness of his message. He took 
pleasure beyond all question in himself; in the strictest 
sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But his con- 
ception of himself was never that of the intellectual. 
He conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenu- 
ous man, a great fighter. ^' 1 was ever," as he says, '' a 
fighter.'^ His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and 
grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues 
among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. 
His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a 
love of plain words and things are the virtues which 
are counted as vices among the aesthetic prigs who pay 
him the greatest honour. He had his more objec- 
tionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do 
with literary egotism. He was not vain of being an 
extraordinary man. He was only somewhat exces- 
sively vain of being an ordinary one. 

The Browning then who published Sordello we have 
to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exag- 
gerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, 
strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble 



II.] EARLY WORKS 41 

man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disen- 
tangle from each other. If we compare, for example, 
the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Mat- 
thew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause lies 
in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual 
aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat. 
The particular peculiarities of Sordello illustrate the 
matter very significantly. A very great part of the 
difficulty of Sordello, for instance, is in the fact that 
before the reader even approaches to tackling the 
difficulties of Browning's actual narrative, he is appar- 
ently expected to start with an exhaustive knowledge 
of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human 
epochs — the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline 
struggles in mediaeval Italy. Here, of course. Brown- 
ing simply betrays that impetuous humility which we 
have previously observed. His father was a student 
of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that 
learning in the same casual manner in which a boy 
learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently in a 
literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met 
and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra 
with about as much literary egotism as an English 
baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ 
grinder. Beyond this the poem of Sordello, power- 
ful as it is, does not present any very significant 
advance in Browning's mental development on that 
already represented by Pauline and Paracelsus, Paul- 
ine, Paracelsus, and Sordello stand together in the 
general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase 
used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, " con- 
fessional.'' All three are analyses of the weak- 
ness which every artistic temperament finds in 



42 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a 
subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was 
profoundly ignorant. This kind of self-analysis is 
always misleading. For we do not see in ourselves 
those dominant traits strong enough to force them- 
selves out in action which our neighbours see. We see 
only a welter of minute mental experiences which 
include all the sins that were ever committed by Nero 
or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, 
we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. 
Consequently, these early impressions which great men 
have given of themselves are nearly always slanders 
upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his 
own conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty 
even inside Napoleon. So it was with Browning, who 
when he was nearly eighty was destined to write with 
the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boy- 
hood poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of 
intellect and soul. 

Sordello, with all its load of learning, and almost 
more oppressive load of beauty, has never had any very 
important influence even upon Browningites, and with 
the rest of the world the name has passed into a jest. 
The most truly memorable thing about it was Brown- 
ing's saying in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, 
a saying which expresses better than anything else 
what geniune metal was in him, "I blame no one, 
least of all myself, who did my best then and 
since." This is indeed a model for all men of letters 
who do not wish to retain only the letters and to lose 
the man. 

When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater 
height and with a new voice. His visit to Asolo, " his 



II.] EARLY WORKS 43 

first love," as he said, " among Italian cities," coincided 
with the stir and transformation in his spirit and the 
breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which 
a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 Pippa 
Passes appeared, and with it the real Browning of the 
modern world. He had made the discovery which 
Byron never made, but which almost every young man 
does at last make — the thrilling discovery that he is 
not Robinson Crusoe. Pippa Passes is the greatest 
poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by 
Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of the pure 
love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a 
false and pedantic sound. The love of humanity is 
a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and 
officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman 
detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love 
of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the 
feelings of a fresh nature, and almost every one has felt 
it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a 
crowded park or a room full of dancers. The love of 
those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a 
sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. In 
our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what 
we have gained ; in the faces in the street the richness 
of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. 
And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, 
when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always 
expresses itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond 
beneficence, a desire to go through the world scatter- 
ing goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that 
mankind should hunt in vain for its best friend as it 
would hunt for a criminal ; that he should be an anony- 
mous Saviour, an unrecorded Christ. Browning, like 



44 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

every one else, when awakened to the beauty and 
variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. 
He has written of himself that he had long thought 
vaguely of a being passing through the world, obscure 
and unnameable, but moulding the destinies of others to 
mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless 
artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, 
whom he dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be 
even unconscious of anything but her own happiness 
and should sway men's lives with a lonely mirth. It 
was a bold and moving conception to show us these 
mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme 
moment eavesdropping upon the solitude of a child. 
And it was an even more precise instinct which made 
Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A 
man's good work is effected by doing what he does, a 
woman's by being what she is. 

There is one other point about Pippa Passes which 
is worth a moment's attention. The great difficulty 
with regard to the understanding of Browning is the 
fact that, to all appearance, scarcely any one can be 
induced to take him seriously as a literary artist. His 
adversaries consider his literary vagaries a disqualifica- 
tion for every position among poets ; and his admirers 
regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence 
of a circle of maiden aunts towards a boy home for the 
holidays. Browning is supposed to do as he likes with 
form, because he had such a profound scheme of 
thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his 
followers will take Browning's literary form seriously, 
he took his own literary form very seriously. Now 
Pijopa Passes is, among other things, eminently re- 
markable as a very original artistic form, a series of 



II.] EARLY WORKS 45 

disconnected but dramatic scenes which have only in 
common the appearance of one figure. For this admir- 
able literary departure Browning, amid all the lauda- 
tions of his " mind '^ and his '' message," has scarcely 
ever had credit. And just as we should, if we took 
Browning seriously as a poet, see that he had made 
many noble literary forms, so we should also see that 
he did make from time to time certain definite literary 
mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in 
Pi}ypa Passes; and, as far as I know, no critic has 
ever thought enough of Browning as an artist to point 
it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole beauty 
of Pippa Passes to make the Monseigneur and his 
accomplice in the last act discuss a plan touching 
the fate of Pippa herself. The whole central and 
splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is 
utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she 
troubles and transforms. To make her in the end turn 
out to be the niece of one of them, is like a whiff from 
an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place, 
but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. 
Having done that. Browning might just as well have 
made Sebald turn out to be her long lost brother, and 
Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married. 
Browning made this mistake when his own splendid 
artistic power was only growing, and its merits and 
its faults in a tangle. But its real literary merits and 
its real literary faults have alike remained unrecognised 
under the influence of that unfortunate intellectualism 
which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and neg- 
lects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. 
Browning's poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, 
reached its flower in Dramatic Lyrics, published in 



46 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

1842. Here he showed himself a picturesque and poig- 
nant artist in a wholly original manner. And the two 
main characteristics of the work were the two charac- 
teristics most commonly denied to Browning, both by 
his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty ; 
but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes 
of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new 
voices in fantastic and realistic verse. Those who 
suppose Browning to be a wholly philosophic poet, 
number a great majority of his commentators. But 
when we come to look at the actual facts, they are 
strangely and almost unexpectedly otherwise. 

Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellec- 
tual character of Browning's poetry run through the 
actual repertoire of the Dramatic Lyrics, The first item 
consists of those splendid war chants called " Cavalier 
Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain 
that there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in 
them. The second item is the fine poem " The Lost 
Leader,'' a poem which expresses in perfectly lucid 
and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned 
indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the 
query. What theory does the next poem, ^^ How they 
brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," express, 
except the daring speculation that it is often exciting 
to ride a good horse in Belgium ? What theory does 
the poem after that, ^^ Through the Metidja to Abd-el- 
Kadr," express, except that it is also frequently excit- 
ing to ride a good horse in Africa ? Then comes 
" Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity with- 
out a gleam of philosophy ; and after that those two 
entirely exquisite " Garden Fancies," the first of which 
is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a woman may be 



II.] EARLY WORKS 47 

charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis 
that a book may be a bore. Then comes " The Soliloquy 
of the Spanish Cloister/' from which the most ingen- 
ious "Browning student'' cannot extract anything 
except that people sometimes hate each other in Spain ; 
and then " The Laboratory," from which he could ex- 
tract nothing except that people sometimes hate each 
other in France. This is a perfectly honest record of •* 
the poems as they stand. And the first eleven poems 
read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious 
characteristics — first, that they contain not even a sug- 
gestion of anything that could be called philosophy ; 
and second, that they contain a considerable proportion 
of the best and most typical poems that Browning ever 
wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote these 
lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impos- 
sible to hazard even the wildest guess as to why he 
wrote them. 

It is permissible to say that the Dramatic Lyrics 
represent the arrival of the real Browning of literary 
history. It is true that he had written already many 
admirable poems of a far more ambitious plan — Paror 
celsus with its splendid version of the faults of the 
intellectual, Pippa Passes with its beautiful deifica- 
tion of unconscious influence. But youth is always 
ambitious and universal; mature work exhibits more 
of individuality, more of the special type and colour 
of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is uni- 
versal, but not individual. The genius who begins 
life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether 
he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised violinist, 
or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister 
of modern times, does at last end by making the dis- 



48 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

covery that there is, after all, one thing, possibly a 
certain style of illustrating Nursery Ehymes, which 
he can really do better than any one else. This was 
what happened to Browning ; like every one else, he 
had to discover first the universe, and then humanity, 
and at last himself. With him, as with all others, the 
great paradox and the great definition of life was this, 
that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In 
Dramatic Lyrics he discovered the one thing that he 
could really do better than any one else — the dra- 
matic lyric. The form is absolutely original : he had 
discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of 
that field he had found himself. 

The actual quality, the actual originality of the form 
is a little difficult to describe. But its general char- 
acteristic is the fearless and most dexterous use of 
grotesque things in order to express sublime emotions. 
The best and most characteristic of the poems are love 
poems; they express almost to perfection the real 
wonderland of youth, but they do not express it by 
the ideal imagery of most poets of love. The imagery 
of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid sur- 
vey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, 
straws, garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window- 
blinds, burnt cork, fashionable fur coats. But in this 
new method he thoroughly expressed the real essen- 
tial, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one 
wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said 
to be, the poet of thought, but pre-eminently one 
of the poets of passion, we could scarcely find a 
better evidence of this profoundly passionate element 
than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. 
There is nothing so fiercely realistic as sentiment and 



II.] EARLY WORKS 49 

emotion. Thought and the intellect are content to ac- 
cept abstractions, summaries, and generalisations; they 
are content that ten acres of ground should be called 
for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes 
called for the sake of argument Y ; they are content 
that a thousand awful and mysterious disappearances 
from the visible universe should be summed up as 
the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxi- 
cations of the soul should bear the general name of the 
instinct of sex. Eationalism can live upon air and signs 
and numbers. But sentiment must have reality ; emo- 
tion demands the real fields, the real widows' homes, 
the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore 
Browning's love poetry is the j&nest love poetry in the 
world, because it does not talk about raptures and 
ideals and gates of heaven, but about window-panes and 
gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with 
abstractions ; it is the truest of all love poetry, be- 
cause it does not speak much about love. It awakens 
in every man the memories of that immortal instant 
when common and dead things had a meaning beyond 
the power of any dictionary to utter, and a value be- 
yond the power of any millionaire to compute. He ex- 
presses the celestial time when a man does not think 
about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he 
is first the greatest of love poets, and secondly the only 
optimistic philosopher except Whitman. 

The general accusation against Browning in connec- 
tion with his use of the grotesque comes in very defi- 
nitely here ; for in using these homely and practical 
images, these allusions, bordering on what many would 
call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual 
and abiding spirit of love. In that delightful poem 



60 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

^^ Youth and Art ^^ we have the singing girl saying to 
her old lover — 

** No harm! It was not my fault, 

If you never turned your eye's tail up 
As I shook upon E in alty 
Or ran the chromatic scale up." 

This is a great deal more like the real chaff that 
passes between those whose hearts are full of new hope 
or of old memory than half the great poems of the 
world. Browning never forgets the little details which 
to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send 
an arrow through the heart. Take, for example, such 
a matter as dress, as it is treated in "A Lover^s 
Quarrel.'^ 

** See, how she looks now, dressed 
In a sledging cap and vest ! 

'Tis a huge fur cloak — 

Like a reindeer's yoke 
Falls the lappet along the breast : 
Sleeves for her arms to rest. 
Or to hang, as my Love likes best." 

That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, 
and is therefore poetry, or at least excellent poetry of 
this order. So great a power have these dead things 
of taking hold on the living spirit, that I question 
whether any one could read through the catalogue of a 
miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things 
which, if realised for a moment, would be near to the 
elemental tears. And if any of us or all of us are 
truly optimists, and believe as Browning did, that 
existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are 
most truly compelled to that sentiment not by any 
argument or triumphant justification of the cosmos, 



II.] EARLY WORKS 51 

but by a few of these momentary and immortal sights 
and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a piano, 
an old door. 

In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama The Return 
of the Druses, a work which contains more of Brown- 
ing^s typical qualities exhibited in an exquisite literary 
shape, than can easily be counted. We have in The 
Return of the Druses his love of the corners of history, 
his interest in the religious mind of the East, with its 
almost terrifying sense of being in the hand of heaven, 
his love of colour and verbal luxury, of gold and green 
and purple, which made some think he must be an 
Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first 
rise of that great psychological ambition which Brown- 
ing was thenceforth to pursue. In Pauline and the 
poems that follow it, Browning has only the compara- 
tively easy task of giving an account of himself. In 
Pippa Passes he has the only less easy task of giving an 
account of humanity. In The Return of the Druses he 
has for the first time the task which is so much harder 
than giving an account of humanity — the task of giving 
an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Orien- 
tal impostor, who is the central character of the play, is 
a peculiarly subtle character, a compound of blasphe- 
mous and lying assumptions of Godhead with genuine 
and stirring patriotic and personal feelings : he is a 
blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble 
humanity. He is supremely important in the history 
of Browning's mind, for he is the first of that great series 
of the apologias of apparently evil men, on which the 
poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative wealth 
— Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince 
Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of Fijine at the Fair, 



62 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

With this play, so far as anj^ point can be fixed for 
the matter, he enters for the first time on the most val- 
uable of all his labours — the defence of the indefensi- 
ble. It may be noticed that Browning was not in the 
least content with the fact that certain human frailties 
had always lain more or less under an implied indul- 
gence; that all human sentiment had agreed that a 
profligate might be generous, or that a drunkard might 
be high-minded. He was insatiable : he wished to go 
further and show in a character like Djabal that an 
impostor might be generous and that a liar might be 
high-minded. In all his life, it must constantly be re- 
membered, he tried always the most difficult things. 
Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to 
manage them, so he tried the queerest human souls 
and attempted to stand in their place. Charity was his 
basic philosophy ; but it was, as it were, a fierce char- 
ity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind 
of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of 
thieves' kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue. 
The character of Djabal in The Return of the Druses is 
the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for the re- 
lief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we 
shall see, even realising the humanity of a noble im- 
postor like Djabal did not content his erratic hunger 
for goodness. He went further again, and realised the 
humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all 
things he retained this essential characteristic, that he 
was not content with seeking sinners — he sought the 
sinners whom even sinners cast out. 

Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the 
drama continued to grow at this time. It must be 
remembered that he had every natural tendency to be 



II.] EARLY WORKS 53 

theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. 
He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuc- 
cessful dramatist; but in the world of abstract temper- 
aments he was by nature an unsuccessful dramatist. 
He was, that is to say, a man who loved above all 
things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, 
a clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it 
so happened, unfortunately, that his own words were 
not plain; that his catastrophes came with a crashing 
and sudden unintelligibleness which left men in doubt 
whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great stroke 
of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like 
a trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its 
actual message quite inaudible. We are bound to 
admit, on the authority of all his best critics and 
admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can 
all. feel that they should have been. He was, as it 
were, by nature a neglected dramatist. He was one 
of those who achieve the reputation, in the literal 
sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to reach 
the centre. 

A Blot on the ^Scutcheon followed Tlie Return of the 
Druses. In connection with the performance of this 
very fine play a quarrel arose which would not be 
worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate the 
curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. 
Macready, who was in desperately low financial circum- 
stances at this time, tried by every means conceiv- 
able to avoid playing the part ; he dodged, he shuffled, 
he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never 
occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He 
pushed off the part upon Phelps, and Browning was 
contented; he resumed it, and Browning was only 



54 ROBERT BROWNING [chap, ii 

discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a 
quarrel ; they were both headstrong, passionate men, 
but the quarrel dealt entirely with the unfortunate 
condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own 
hat over his eyes ; Macready flung Browning's manu- 
script with a slap upon the floor. But all the time it 
never occurred to the poet that Macready's conduct 
was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a 
desire for money. Browning was in fact by his prin- 
ciples and his ideals a man of the world, but in his 
life far otherwise. That worldly ease which is to most 
of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was as it 
were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with 
perfect sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayf air. 
There was in him a quality which can only be most 
delicately described ; for it was a virtue which bears 
a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of vices. 
Those curious people who think the truth a thing that 
can be said violently and with ease, might naturally 
call Browning a snob. He was fond of society, of 
fashion, and even of wealth : but there is no snobbery 
in admiring these things or any things if we admire 
them for the right reasons. He admired them as 
worldlings cannot admire them : he was, as it were, the 
child who comes in with the dessert. He bore the 
same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears 
to the Pharisee : something frightfully close and simi- 
lar and yet an everlasting opposite. 



CHAPTER III 

BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 

Egbert Browning had his faults, and the general 
direction of those faults has been previously suggested. 
The chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutal- 
ity of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, 
was destined to cling to him all through his life, and 
to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last 
quiet years before his death. But any one who wishes 
to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and 
reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was 
of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only 
study one most striking and determining element in 
the question — Browning's simple, heartfelt, and un- 
limited admiration for other people. He was one of 
a generation of great men, of great men who had a 
certain peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and 
defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, Euskin, Matthew Arnold, 
were alike in being children of a very strenuous and 
conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness 
and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing 
a certain almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, 
a certain fear of other influences. Browning alone had 
no fear; he welcomed, evidently without the least 
affectation, all the influences of his day. A very 
interesting letter of his remains in which he describes 

55 



66 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

his pleasure in a university dinner. " Praise/^ he says 
in effect, ^^was given very deservedly to Matthew 
Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of Oxford 
men, Clough." The really striking thing about these 
three names is the fact that they are united in Brown- 
ing's praise in a way in which they are by no means 
united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in one of 
his extant letters, calls Swinburne ^^a young pseudo- 
Shelley," who, according to Arnold, thinks he can 
make Greek plays good by making them modern. 
Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised 
Clough in a contemptuous rhyme : — 

** There was a bad poet named Clough, 
Whom his friends all united to puff. 
But the public, though dull, 
Has not quite such a skull 
As belongs to believers in Clough." 

The same general fact will be found through the 
whole of Browning's life and critical attitude. He 
adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who sneered at him. 
He delighted in Mill, and also in Euskin who rebelled 
against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and also Lan- 
dor who hurled interminable curses against Napoleon. 
He admired all the cycle of great men who all con- 
temned each other. To say that he had no streak of 
envy in his nature would be true, but unfair ; for there 
is no justification for attributing any of these great 
men's opinions to envy. But Browning was really 
unique, in that he had a certain spontaneous and 
unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He 
admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset 
or a chance spring leaf. He no more thought whether 
he could be as good as that man in that department 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 67 

than whether he could be redder than the sunset or 
greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally 
magnanimous in the literal sense of that sublime word ; \ 
his mind was so great that it rejoiced in the triumphs 
of strangers. In this spirit Browning had already cast 
his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and 
had been greatly and justifiably struck with the work 
of a young lady poet, Miss Barrett. 

That impression was indeed amply justified. In a 
time when it was thought necessary for a lady to dilute 
the wine of poetry to its very weakest tint, Miss Barrett 
had contrived to produce poetry which was open to 
literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. 
When she erred it was through an Elizabethan audac- 
ity and luxuriance, a straining after violent meta- 
phors. With her reappeared in poetry a certain 
element which had not been present in it since the 
last days of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the 
most elementary human passion with something which 
can only be described as wit, a certain love of quaint 
and sustained similes, or parallels wildly logical, 
and of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this 
hot wit as distinct from the cold wit of the school of 
Pope, in the puns and buffooneries of Shakespeare. 
We find it lingering in Hudibras, and we do not find 
it again until we come to such strange and strong 
lines as these of Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on 
Napoleon : — 

*' Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise — sooth 
But glittered dew-like in the covenanted 
And high-rayed light. He was a despot — granted, 
But the ai/rbs of his autocratic mouth 
Said * Yea ' i' the people's French I He magnified 
The image of the freedom he denied." 



68 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as 
the eyes in the peacock fans of the Vatican, which she 
describes as winking at the Italian tricolour. She 
often took the step from the sublime to the ridiculous : 
but to take this step one must reach the sublime. 
Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs 
but then urgently needed assertion, the fact that 
womanliness, whether in life or poetry, was a positive 
thing, and not the negative of manliness. Her verse 
at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and 
very nearly as clever. The difference between their 
natures was a difference between two primary colours, 
not between dark and light shades of the same colour. 

Browning had often heard not only of the public, 
but of the private life of this lady from his father's 
friend Kenyon. The old man, who was one of those 
rare and valuable people who have a talent for estab- 
lishing definite relationships with people after a com- 
paratively short intercourse, had been appointed by 
Miss Barrett as her " fairy godfather." He spoke much 
about her to Browning, and of Browning to her, with 
a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. 
And there could be little doubt that the two poets 
would have met long before had it not been for certain 
peculiarities in the position of Miss Barrett. She was 
an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique kind, 
and living beyond all question under very unique 
circumstances. 

Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a 
landowner in the West Indies, and thus, by a some- 
what curious coincidence, had borne a part in the same 
social system which stung Browning's father into 
revolt and renunciation. The part played by Edward 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 59 

Barrett, however, though little or nothing is known 
of it, was probably very different. He was a man 
conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the 
nation and the family, and endowed with some faculties 
for making his conceptions prevail. He was an able 
man, capable in his language of a certain bitter felicity 
of phrase. He was rigidly upright and responsible, 
and he had a capacity for profound affection. But 
selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious 
selfishness, was eating away his moral foundations, as 
it tends to eat away those of all despots. His most 
fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole 
atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was 
fully as oppressive in the case of his good moods as 
in the case of his bad ones. He had, what is perhaps 
the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit 
merely which thinks that nothing should stand in 
the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks 
that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. 
His daughters must be absolutely at his beck and 
call, whether it was to be brow-beaten or caressed. 
During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, 
the family had lived in the country, and for that 
brief period she had known a more wholesome life 
than she was destined ever to know again until her 
marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the 
general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, 
weak, and almost moribund from the cradle. In 
early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, 
but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good 
horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her 
for so many years afterwards happened to her when 
she was riding. The injury to her spine, how- 



60 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

ever, will be found, the more we study her his- 
tory, to be only one of the influences which were to 
darken those bedridden years, and to have among 
them a far less important place than has hitherto 
been attached to it. Her father moved to a melan- 
choly house in Wimpole Street; and his own char- 
acter growing gloomier and stranger as time went 
on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sick- 
bed in a manner compounded of the pessimist and 
the disciplinarian. She was not permitted to stir 
from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to 
her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with 
a kind of melancholy glee, and with the avowed 
solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She was 
surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of 
all atmospheres — a medical atmosphere. The exist- 
ence of this atmosphere has nothing to do with the 
actual nature or prolongation of disease. A man may 
pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad 
health, and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the 
three hours as exceptional and the two as normal. 
But the curse that lay on the Barrett household was 
the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition 
of a human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett 
was living emotionally and aesthetically, like some 
detestable decadent poet, upon his daughter's decline. 
He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, explana- 
tions, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread 
and meat for which he hungered ; and when the cloud 
was upon his spirit, he would lash out at all things 
and every one with the insatiable cruelty of the 
sentimentalist. 

It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 61 

thoroughly morbid and impotent by this intolerable 
violence and more intolerable tenderness. In her 
estimate of her own health she did, of course, suffer. 
It is evident that she practically believed herself to 
be dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of 
that silent and quite unfathomable kind of courage 
which is only found in women, and she took a much 
more cheerful view of death than her father did of 
life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long 
days of loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sym- 
pathy, had not tamed a spirit which was swift and 
headlong to a fault. She could still own with truth 
the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impa- 
tience, " tearing open parcels instead of untying them ; 
looking at the end of books before she had read them 
was,'' she said, "incurable with her.'' It is difficult 
to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the 
achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while 
possessing all the excuses of an invalid, to retain some 
of the faults of a tomboy. 

Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and 
urgency in her demands, marked her in the eyes of all 
who came in contact with her. In after years, when 
Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, she 
told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown 
again " that minute." There we have very graphically 
the spirit which tears open parcels. Not in vain, or 
as a mere phrase, did her husband after her death 
describe her as " all a wonder and a wild desire." 

She had, of course, lived her second and real life in 
literature and the things of the mind, and this in a very 
genuine and strenuous sense. Her mental occupations 
were not mere mechanical accomplishments almost 



62 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were 
they coloured in any visible manner by the unwhole- 
some atmosphere in which she breathed. She used 
her brains seriously; she was a good Greek scholar, 
and read iEschylus and Euripides unceasingly with 
her blind friend, Mr. Boyd ; and she had, and retained 
even to the hour of her death, a passionate and quite 
practical interest in great public questions. Naturally 
she was not uninterested in Eobert Browning, but it 
does not appear that she felt at this time the same 
kind of fiery artistic curiosity that he felt about her. 
He does appear to have felt an attraction, which may 
almost be called mystical, for the personality which 
was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. 
In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke 
of a former occasion on which they had nearly met, 
and compared it to the sensation of having once been 
outside the chapel of some marvellous illumination 
and found the door barred against him. In that 
phrase it is easy to see how much of the romantic 
boyhood of Browning remained inside the resolute 
man of the world into which he was to all external 
appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his 
letters with charming sincerity and humour, and with 
much of that leisurely self-revelation which is possible 
for an invalid who has nothing else to do. She herself, 
with her love of quiet and intellectual companionship, 
would probably have been quite happy for the rest 
of her life if their relations had always remained a 
learned and delightful correspondence. But she must 
have known very little of Eobert Browning if she 
imagined he would be contented with this airy and 
bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 63 

sufficiently fond of his own way; at this time he 
was especially prompt and impulsive, and he had 
always a great love for seeing and hearing and feel- 
ing people, a love of the physical presence of friends, 
which made him slap men on the back and hit them 
in the chest when he was very fond of them. The 
correspondence between the two poets had not long 
begun when Browning suggested something which 
was almost a blasphemy in the Barrett household, that 
he should come and call on her as he would on any one 
else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of 
fear and doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the 
chief of which were her health and the season of the 
year and the east winds. " If my truest heart's wishes 
avail," replied Browning, obstinately, "you shall laugh 
at east winds yet as I do.'' 

Then began the chief part of that celebrated corre- 
spondence which has within comparatively recent years 
been placed before the world. It is a correspondence 
which has very peculiar qualities and raises many 
profound questions. 

It is impossible to deal at any length with the pic- 
ture given in these remarkable letters of the gradual 
progress and amalgamation of two spirits of great nat- 
ural potency and independence, without saying at least 
a word about the moral question raised by their publi- 
cation and the many expressions of disapproval which 
it entails. To the mind of the present writer the 
whole of such a question should be tested by one per- 
fectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I 
am not prepared to admit that there is or can be, prop- 
erly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred to 
be known. That spiritual beauty and spiritual truth 



64 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

are in their nature communicable, and that they should 
be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root 
of every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon 
a hill, and not in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself 
involves the same idea as the ordinary name of a daily 
paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any similar type 
of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men par- 
takers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can 
imagine nothing saner and nothing manlier than his 
course in doing so. Thus it was that Dante made a new 
heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in the streets 
of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisa- 
tion by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential 
which exists in all such cases as these is that the man 
in question believes that he can make the story as stately 
to the whole world as it is to him, and he chooses his 
words to that end. Yet when a work contains expres- 
sions which have one value and significance when read 
by the people to whom they were addressed, and an 
entirely different value and significance when read 
by any one else, then the element of the violation of 
sanctity does arise. But it is not because there is any- 
thing in this world too sacred to tell. It is rather be- 
cause there are a great many things in this world too 
sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to 
the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, 
I see no reason why he should not. But the objection 
to letters which begin ^' My dear Ba,'^ is that they do 
not convey anything of the sort. As far as any third 
person is concerned. Browning might as well have been 
expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in 
the dialect of the Cherokees. Objection to the publi- 
cation of such passages as ^that, in short, is not the 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 66 

fact that they tell us about the love of the Brownings, 
but that they do not tell us about it. 

Upon this principle it is obvious that there should 
have been a selection among the Letters, but not a se- 
lection which should exclude anything merely because 
it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. Brown- 
ing had not desired any people to know that they were 
fond of each other, they would not have written and 
published " One Word More '^ or " The Sonnets from 
the Portuguese.^^ Nay, they would not have been mar- 
ried in a public church, for every one who is married in 
a church does make a confession of love of absolutely 
national publicity, and tacitly, therefore, repudiates 
any idea that such confessions are too sacred for the 
world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should 
have no noble passions or sentiments in public may 
have been designed to make private life holy and un- 
defiled, but it has had very little actual effect except 
to make public life cynical and preposterously unmean- 
ing. But the words of a poem or the words of the 
English Marriage Service, which are as fine as many 
poems, is a language dignified and deliberately in- 
tended to be understood by all. If the bride and bride- 
groom in church, instead of uttering those words, were 
to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the 
foibles of Aunt Matilda, or of childish secrets which 
they would tell each other in a lane, it would be a parallel 
case to the publication of some of the Browning Letters. 
Why the serious and universal portions of those Letters 
could not be published without those which are to us 
idle and unmeaning it is difl&cult to understand. Our 
wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs 
to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love. 



66 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning 
Letters which tends to make their publication far less 
open to objection than almost any other collection of 
love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary sen- 
timentalist who delights in the most emotional of 
magazine interviews, will not be able to get much 
satisfaction out of them, because he and many persons 
more acute will be quite unable to make head or tail 
of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is 
the most extraordinary correspondence in the world. 
There seem to be only two main rules for this form of 
letter- writing : the first is, that if a sentence can begin 
with a parenthesis it always should ; and the second 
is, that if you have written from a third to half of a 
sentence you need never in any case write any more. 
It would be amusing to watch any one who felt an idle 
curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers open- 
ing the Browning Letters. He would probably come 
upon some such simple and lucid passage as the fol- 
lowing : ^' I ought to wait, say a week at least, having 
killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your 
dogs. . . . But not being Phoibos ApoUon, you are to 
know further that when I did think I might go mod- 
estly on . . . w/xot, let me get out of this slough of a 
simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles.'^ 

What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of 
this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine. 
The only plain conclusion which appears to emerge 
from the words is the somewhat curious one — that 
Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to 
Wimpole Street and of demolishing the live stock on 
those somewhat unpromising premises. Nor will he be 
any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of Miss 



in.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 67 

Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great 
central idea of the Browning correspondence that the 
most enlightening passages in a letter consist of dots. 
She replies in a letter following the above : " But if it 
could be possible that you should mean to say you 
would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading 
this ^ Attic contraction ' quite the wrong way. You see 
I am afraid of the difference between flattering myself 
and being flattered . . . the fatal difference. And 
now you will understand that I should be too over- 
joyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . how- 
ever incarnated with blots and pen scratches ... to 
be able to ask impudently of them now? Is that 
plain ? " Most probably she thought it was. 

With regard to Browning himself this characteristic 
is comparatively natural and appropriate. Browning's 
prose was in any case the most roundabout affair in the 
world. Those who knew him say that he would often 
send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely 
impossible to gather where the appointment was, or 
when it was, or what was its object. This fact is one 
of the best of all arguments against the theory of 
Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have 
to be somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend 
sixpence for the pleasure of sending an unintelligible 
communication to the dislocation of his own plans. 
The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of his 
brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. 
The words '' tail foremost '' express Browning's style 
with something more than a conventional accuracy. 
The tail, the most insignificant part of an animal, is 
also often the most animated and fantastic. An utter- 
ance of Browning is often like a strange animal walking 



68 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

backwards, who flourishes his tail with such energy 
that every one takes it for his head. He was in other 
words, at least in his prose and practical utterances, 
more or less incapable of telling a story without telling 
the least important thing first. If a man who belonged 
to an Italian secret society, one local branch of which 
bore as a badge an olive-green ribbon, had entered his 
house, and in some sensational interview tried to bribe 
or blackmail him, he would have told the story with 
great energy and indignation, but he would have been 
incapable of beginning with anything except the 
question of the colour of olives. His whole method 
was founded both in literature and life upon the 
principle of the " ex pede Herculem," and at the 
beginning of his description of Hercules the foot 
appears some sizes larger than the hero. It is, in short, 
natural enough that Browning should have written his 
love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his 
publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of 
Mrs. Browning it is somewhat more difficult to under- 
stand. For she at least had, beyond all question, a 
quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not 
easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was 
partly under the influence of her own quality of pas- 
sionate ingenuity or emotional wit of which we have 
already taken notice in dealing with her poems, and 
she was partly also no doubt under the influence of 
Browning. Whatever was the reason, their corre- 
spondence was not of the sort which can be pursued 
very much by the outside public. Their letters may 
be published a hundred times over, they still remain 
private. They write to each other in a language of 
their own, an almost exasperatingly impressionist 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 69 

language, a language chiefly consisting of dots and 
dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes 
of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard after- 
wards of their eventual elopement said with that slight 
touch of bitterness he always used in speaking of 
Browning, " So Eobert Browning and Miss Barrett 
have gone off together. I hope they understand each ; 
other — nobody else would." It would be difficult to 
pay a higher compliment to a marriage. Their common 
affection for Kenyon was a great element in their lives 
and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient 
theory to account for Mr. Kenyon,'' writes Browning, 
mysteriously, " and his otherwise unaccountable kind- 
ness to me." " For Mr. Kenyon's kindness," retorts 
Elizabeth Barrett, ^^ no theory will account. I class it 
with mesmerism for that reason." There is something 
very dignified and beautiful about the simplicity 
of these two poets vying with each other in giving 
adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the 
world would never have heard but for them. 
Browning's feeling for him was indeed especially 
strong and typical. " There," he said, pointing after 
the old man as he left the room, ^^ there goes one of 
the most splendid men living — a man so noble in his 
friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted 
and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over 
the world as * Kenyon the Magnificent.' " There is 
something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best 
in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or 
of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the 
heroic largeness of real sociability. Being himself a 
warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in 
Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission 



70 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

of superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be 
congratulated on the fact that he had grasped the great 
but now neglected truth, that a man may actually be 
great, yet not in the least able. 

Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received 
on her side, as has been stated, with a variety of objec- 
tions. The chief of these was the strangely feminine 
and irrational reason that she was not worth seeing, a 
point on which the seeker for an interview might be 
permitted to form his own opinion. '^ There is nothing 
to see in me nor to hear in me. — I never learned to 
talk as you do in London ; although I can admire that 
brightness of ^^^^ speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. 
If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the 
flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy 
in it, and so it has all my colours. The rest of me is 
nothing but a root fit for the ground and dark." The 
substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I 
will call at two on Tuesday." 

They met on May 20, 1846. A short time after- 
wards he had fallen in love with her and made her an 
offer of marriage. To a person in the domestic atmos- 
phere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to 
have been paralysing. " I will tell you what I once 
said in jest," she writes, "if a prince of El Dorado 
should come with a pedigree of lineal descent from 
some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket of 
good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel 
in the other ! — ^ Why, even ihen^ said my sister Arabel, 
^ it would not do,^ And she was right ; we all agreed 
that she was right." 

This may be taken as a fairly accurate description 
of the real state of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 71 

It is illustrative of the very best and breeziest side 
of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she could be so 
genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the 
human mind. 

Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, 
of a character to dismay and repel all those who sur- 
rounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was not wholly a matter 
of the fancies of her father. The whole of her family, 
and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, 
did seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to 
be moved, to say nothing of being married, and that 
a life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding 
too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to 
the other, was the only life she could expect on this 
earth. Almost alone in holding another opinion and 
in urging her to a more vigorous view of her condition, 
stood Browning himself. ^^ But you are better,'' he 
would say; " you look so and speak so " Which of the 
two opinions was right is, of course, a complex medical 
matter into which a book like this has neither the right 
nor the need to enter. But this much may be stated 
as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 
Elizabeth Barrett was still living under the great family 
convention which provided her with nothing but an 
elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see 
proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest the 
shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, 
in Italy, as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill 
in a wine hamper, toiling up to the crests of mountains 
at four o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on 
a donkey to what she calls " an inaccessible volcanic 
ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incred- 
ible thal^any one so ill as her family believed her to 



72 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

be should have lived this life for twenty-four hours. 
Something must be allowed for the intoxication of a 
new tie and a new interest in life. But such exal- 
tations can in their nature hardly last a month, and 
Mrs. Browning lived for fifteen years afterwards in in- 
finitely better health than she had ever known before. 
In the light of modern knowledge it is not very difficult 
or very presumptuous of us, to guess that she had been 
in her father's house to some extent inoculated with 
hysteria, that strange affliction which some people 
speak of as if it meant the absence of disease, but 
which is in truth the most terrible of all diseases. It 
must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was 
known of spine complaints such as that from which 
Elizabeth Barrett suffered, less still of the nervous 
conditions they create, and least of all of hysterical 
phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered 
air and sunlight and activity, and all the things 
the mere idea of which chilled the Barretts with 
terror. In our day, in short, it would have been 
recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of 
neurosis which exhibits every fact of a disease except 
its origin, that strange possession which makes the 
body itself a hypocrite. Those who surrounded Miss 
Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew 
nothing of it ; and probably if he knew anything, knew 
less than they did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a 
great deal of truth, that of ill-heath and its sensations 
he remained " pathetically ignorant " to his dying day. 
But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and 
personal experience, without a shadow of medical 
authority, almost without anything that can be formally 
called a right to his opinion, he was, and remained, 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 73 

right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to the 
practical centre of the situation. He did not know 
anything about hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of 
surroundings, but he knew that the atmosphere of 
Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any hu- 
man being, alive^jdjiiig^Qli^ead. His stand upon this 
matter has really a certain human interest, since it is 
an example of a thing which will from time to time 
occur, the interposition of the average man to the con- 
founding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly 
right nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, 
and we find in military matters an Oliver Cromwell 
who will make every mistake known to strategy and 
yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a 
Eobert Browning whose views have not a technical 
leg to stand on and are entirely correct. 

But while Browning was thus standing alone in his 
view of the matter, while Edward Barrett had to all 
appearance on his side a phalanx of all the sanities and 
respectabilities, there came suddenly a new develop- 
ment, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and 
to weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon 
further examination of Miss Barrett's condition, the 
physicians had declared that it was absolutely necessary 
that she should be taken to Italy. This may, without 
any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the 
last great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. 
He had not originally been an evil man, only a man 
who, being stoical in practical things, permitted himself, 
to his great detriment, a self-indulgence in moral things. 
He had grown to regard his pious and dying daughter 
as part of the furniture of the house and of the uni- 
verse. And as long as the great mass of authorities 



74 ROBERT BROWNING [chap 

were on his side, his illusion was quite pardonable. 
His crisis came when the authorities changed their 
front, and with one accord asked his permission to send 
his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he refused. 
He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, 
his own peculiar and somewhat detestable way of 
refusing. Once when his daughter had asked a per- 
fectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, per- 
mission, that is, to keep her favourite brother with her 
during an illness, her singular parent remarked that 
" she might keep him if she liked, but that he had 
looked for greater self-sacrifice.^' These were the 
weapons with which he ruled his people. For the 
worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; 
the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays 
on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors 
who have discovered the last secret of oppression, 
that which is told in the fine verse of Swinburne : — 

" The racks of the earth and the rods 
Are weak as the foam on the sands ; 
The heart is the prey for the gods, 
Who crucify hearts, not hands." 

He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating con- 
sciences of women, was, with regard to one of them, 
very near to the end of his reign. When Browning 
heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he pro- 
posed definitely that they should marry and go on the 
journey together. 

Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, 
and were active in the matter. Kenj^on, the gentlest 
and most universally complimentary of mortals, had 
marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 75 

the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's 
conduct with a degree of fire and frankness which 
must have been perfectly amazing in a man of his 
almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. Jameson, 
an old and generous friend of the family, had imme- 
diately stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to 
Italy herself, thus removing all questions of expense or 
arrangement. She would appear to have stood to her 
guns in the matter with splendid persistence and 
magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a 
change of mind, and delayed her own journey to the 
continent more than once. At length, when it became 
evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's consent was 
hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe 
alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there 
many days, when she received a formal call from 
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 
who had been married for some days. Her astonish- 
ment is rather a picturesque thing to think about. 

The manner in which this sensational elopement, 
which was, of course, the talk of the whole literary 
world, had been effected, is narrated as every one knows, 
in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that 
an immediate marriage was the only solution ; and hav- 
ing put his hand to the plough, did not decline even 
when it became obviously necessary that it should be a 
secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily 
candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy 
was really exasperating ; but every one with any im- 
agination or chivalry will rejoice that he accepted 
the evil conditions. He had always had the courage 
to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him 
to have the greater^ (IQUjage to tell a lie, and he told 



76 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

it with perfect cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus 
disappearing surreptitiously with an invalid woman 
he was doing something against which there were un- 
doubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened 
that the most cogent and important thing of all was to 
be said for it. 

It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter 
of Browning's character, to read the accounts which he 
writes to Elizabeth Barrett of his attitude towards the 
approaching coup de tMdtre, In one place he says, sugges- 
tively enough, that he does not in the least trouble about 
the disapproval of her father ; the man whom he fears as 
a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could 
only walk into the room and fly into a passion ; and this 
Browning could have received with perfect equanimity. 
'^ But,'' he says, " if Kenyon knows of the matter, I 
shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations 
(with his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining 
your social position, destroying your health, etc., etc." 
This touch is very suggestive of the power of the old 
worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people as 
well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long 
been perfectly aware of the way in which things were 
going ; and the method he adopted in order to comment 
on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation with 
Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there 
was anything between her sister and a certain Captain 
Cooke. On receiving a surprised reply in the negative, 
he remarked apologetically that he had been misled 
into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the 
house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he 
meant ; but the logical allusiveness of the attack re- 
minds one of a fragment of some Meredithian comedy. 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 77 

The manner in which Browning bore himself in this 
acute and necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, 
more thoroughly to his credit than anything else in his 
career. He never came out so well in all his long years 
of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one act 
of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, 
he is not ashamed to name it ; neither, on the other 
hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine 
prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of 
God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He 
was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring 
a crusade against social laws. We all feel, whatever 
may be our opinions on the matter, that the great 
danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting 
of a private necessity against a public custom, is that 
men are somewhat too weak and self -deceptive to be 
trusted with such a power of giving dispensations to 
themselves. We feel that men without meaning to do 
so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law 
and end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the 
best and most striking things to notice about Robert 
Browning is the fact that he did this thing considering 
it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave it 
really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break 
the rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. 
It did not in the least degree weaken the sanctity of 
the general rule. At a supreme crisis of his life he 
did an unconventional thing, and he lived and died 
conventional. It would be hard to say whether he 
appears the more thoroughly sane in having performed 
the act, or in not having allowed it to affect him. 

Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the 
obstinate and almost monotonous assertion of Brown- 



78 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

ing that this elopement was the only possible course 
of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did 
something, which in its curious and impulsive sym- 
bolism, belongs almost to a more primitive age. The 
sullen system of medical seclusion to which she had 
long been subjected has already been described. The 
most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by 
many on the ground that it was not safe for her to 
leave her sofa and her sombre room. On the day on 
which it was necessary for her finally to accept or 
reject Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, 
and to the amazement and mystification of that lady 
asked for a carriage. In this she drove into Eegent's 
Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and stood lean- 
ing against a tree for some moments, looking round 
her at the leaves and the sky. She then entered 
the cab again, drove home, and agreed to the elope- 
ment. This was possibly the best poem that she ever 
produced. 

Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a 
great deal of prudence and knowledge of human nature. 
Early one morning in September 1846 Miss Barrett 
walked quietly out of her father's house, became Mrs. 
Eobert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and 
returned home again as if nothing had happened. In 
this arrangement Browning showed some of that real 
insight into the human spirit which ought to make 
a' poet the most practical of all men. The incident 
was, in the nature of things, almost overpoweringly 
exciting to his wife, in spite of the truly miraculous 
courage with which she supported it ; and he desired, 
therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tran- 
quillising effect of familiar scenes and faces. One 



III.] BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 79 

trifling incident is worth mentioning which is almost 
imfathomably characteristic of Browning. It has al- 
ready been remarked in these pages that he was pre- 
eminently one of those men whose expanding opinions 
never alter by a hairsbreadth the actual ground plan of 
their moral sense. Browning would have felt the same 
things right and the same things wrong, whatever views 
he had held. During the brief and most trying period 
between his actual marriage and his actual elopement, 
it is most significant that he would not call at the 
house in Wimpole Street, because he would have been 
obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He 
was acting a lie ; he was deceiving a father ; he was 
putting a sick woman to a terrible risk; and these 
things he did not disguise from himself for a moment, 
but he could not bring himself to say two words to 
a maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling 
of the literary man for the sacredness of the uttered 
word, but there is far more of a certain rooted tradi- 
tional morality which it is impossible either to describe 
or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older 
and more primeval thing than the oldest and most 
primeval passions of other men. If we wish to under- 
stand him, we must always remember that in dealing 
with any of his actions we have not to ask whether 
the action contains the highest morality, but whether 
we should have felt inclined to do it ourselves. 

At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum 
was over. Mrs. Browning went for the second time 
almost on tiptoe out of her father's house, accom- 
panied only by her maid and her dog, which was only 
just successfully prevented from barking. Before the 
end of the day in all probability Barrett had discov- 



80 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. iii. 

ered that his dying daughter had fled with Browning 
to Italy. 

They never saw him again, and hardly more than a 
faint echo came to them of the domestic earthquake 
which they left behind them. They do not appear to 
have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts 
at a reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered 
at last that her father was in truth not a man to be 
treated with ; hardly, perhaps, even a man to be 
blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that 
she had grown up in the house of a madman. 



CHAPTER IV 

BROWNING IN ITALY 

The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved 
soon afterwards to Florence. Of the life of the 
Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps to be said 
in the way of description and analysis, little to be 
said in the way of actual narrative. Each of them 
had passed through the one incident of existence. Just 
as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before her marriage been 
uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. 
A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of 
brilliant friends, a succession of high and ardent intel- 
lectual interests, they experienced ; but their life was 
of the kind that if it were told at all, would need to 
be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous intel- 
lectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far 
into the country, eating strawberries and drinking milk 
out of the basins of the peasants ; how they fell in with 
the strangest and most picturesque figures of Italian 
society ; how they climbed mountains and read books 
and modelled in clay and played on musical instru- 
ments ; how Browning was made a kind of arbiter 
between two improvising Italian bards ; how he had 
to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's 
hymn brought the knocking of the Austrian police; 
these are the things of which his life is full, trifling 

G 81 



82 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

and picturesque things, a series of interludes, a beauti- 
ful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. 
The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their 
son and the death of Browning's mother in 1849. 

It is well known that Browning loved Italy ; that 
it was his adopted country ; that he said in one of the 
finest of his lyrics that the name of it would be found 
written on his heart. But the particular character of 
this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. 
There are thousands of educated Europeans who love 
Italy, who live in it, who visit it annually, who come 
across a continent to see it, who hunt out its darkest 
picture and its most mouldering carving ; but they are 
all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead 
place. It is a branch of their universal museum, a de- 
partment of dry bones. There are rich and cultivated 
persons, particularly Americans, who seem to think 
that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or 
a hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they 
wanted a whiff of beauty. Browning did not feel at 
all in this manner ; he was intrinsically incapable of 
offering such an insult to the soul of a nation. If 
he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would 
not have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. 
In everything on earth, from the Middle Ages to the 
amoeba, who is discussed at such length in " Mr. Sludge 
the Medium,'' he is interested in the life in things. 
He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the 
life in Italian politics. 

Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be 
given of this matter is in Browning's interest in art. 
He was immeasurably fascinated at all times by paint- 
ing and sculpture, and his sojourn in Italy gave him, 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 83 

of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for the 
study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in 
these studies was not like that of the ordinary cultured 
visitor to the Italian cities. Thousands of such visitors, 
for example, study those endless lines of magnificent 
Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all the 
Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and 
talk about them, and note them in their catalogues, 
and describe them in their diaries. But the way in 
which they affected Browning is described very sug- 
gestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. 
She describes herself as longing for her husband to 
write poems, beseeching him to write poems, but find- 
ing all her petitions useless because her husband was 
engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking 
them as fast as he made them. This is Browning's 
interest in art, the interest in a living thing, the interest 
in a growing thing, the insatiable interest in how things 
are done. Every one who knows his admirable poems on 
painting — " Era Lippo Lippi " and '^ Andrea del Sarto " 
and " Pictor Ignotus " — will remember how fully they 
deal with technicalities, how they are concerned with 
canvas, with oil, with a mess of colours. Sometimes 
they are so technical as to be mysterious to the casual 
reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a 
lady I once knew who had merely read the title of 
" Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper,'' and 
thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a dog, 
whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from 
the fulfilment of his duty. These Browning poems 
do not merely deal with painting; they smell of 
paint. They are the works of a man to whom 
art is not what it is to so many of the non-pro- 



84 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

fessional lovers of art, a thing accomplished, a valley 
of bones : to him it is a field of crops continually- 
growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning 
was interested, like some scientific man, in the ob- 
stetrics of art. There is a large army of educated 
men who can talk art with artists; but Browning 
could not merely talk art with artists — he could talk 
shop with them. Personally he may not have known 
enough about painting to be more than a fifth-rate 
painter, or enough about the organ to be more than 
a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said 
and done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows 
which a first-rate art critic does not know ; there are 
some things which a sixth-rate organist knows which 
a first-rate judge of music does not know. And these 
were the things that Browning knew. 

He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. 
The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities 
of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas 
the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this 
peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word ; the 
actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a 
genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing 
very much if he not only practises it without any hope 
of fame or money, but even practises it without any 
hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils 
of the work more than any other man can love the 
rewards of it. Browning was in this strict sense a 
strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the 
course of his life half a hundred things at which he 
can never have even for a moment expected to succeed. 
The story of his life is full of absurd little ingenuities, 
such as the discovery of a way of making pictures by 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 85 

roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the 
same spirit of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a 
very considerable extent a technical expert in painting, 
a technical expert in sculpture, a technical expert in 
music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so 
bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing 
at length in letters and diaries his views of certain 
criminal cases in an Italian town. Indeed, his own 
Ring and the Book is merely a sublime detective story. 
He was in a hundred things this type of man; he 
was precisely in the position, with a touch of greater 
technical success, of the admirable figure in Steven- 
son's story who said, '' I can play the fiddle nearly well 
enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny 
gaff, but not quite.'' 

The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was 
anything but an antiquarian fancy ; it was the love of 
a living thing. We see the same phenomenon in an 
even more important matter — the essence and indi- 
viduality of the country itself. 

Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any 
means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre 
that it is to so many of those cultivated English men 
and women who live in Italy and enjoy and admire 
and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the 
type and centre of the religion and politics of a con- 
tinent; the ancient and flaming heart of Western 
history, the very Europe of Europe. And they lived 
at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all 
dramas — the making of a new nation, one of the things 
that makes men feel that they are still in the morning 
of the earth. Before their eyes, with every circum- 
stance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama 



86 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

of the unification of Italy, with the bold and roman- 
tic militarism of Garibaldi, the more bold and more 
romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They lived in a time 
when affairs of State had almost the air of works 
of art; and it is not strange that these two poets 
should have become politicians in one of those great 
creative epochs when even the politicians have to be 
poets. 

Browning was on this question and on all the 
questions of continental and English politics a very 
strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere detail of purely 
biographical interest, like any view he might take of 
the authorship of the '' Eikon Basilike '^ or the authen- 
ticity of the Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so 
inevitably involved in the poet's whole view of exist- 
ence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative Conserv- 
ative would feel that Browning was bound to be a 
Liberal. His mind was possessed, perhaps even to 
excess, by a belief in growth and energy and in the 
ultimate utility of error. He held the great central 
Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the 
human spirit beyond, and perhaps even independent 
of, our own sincerest convictions. The world was 
going right he felt, most probably in his way, but 
certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote 
in l^ter years, entitled " Why I am a Liberal," expresses 
admirably this philosophical root of his politics. It 
asks in effect how he, who had found truth in so many 
strange forms after so many strange wanderings, can 
be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of 
others. A Liberal may be defined approximately as 
a man who, if he could, by waving his hand in a dark 
room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers of mankind 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 87 

for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a 
Liberal in this sense. 

And just as the great Liberal movement which fol- 
lowed the French Eevolution made this claim for the 
liberty and personality of human beings, so it made it 
for the liberty and personality of nations. It attached 
indeed to the independence of a nation something of 
the same wholly transcendental sanctity which human- 
ity has in all legal systems attached to the life of a 
man. The grounds were indeed much the same ; no 
one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, 
and no one could say absolutely that a variety of na- 
tional life was useless or must remain useless to the 
world. Men remembered how often barbarous tribes 
or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to 
-revive the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. 
And this sense of the personality of a nation, as dis- 
tinct from the personalities of all other nations, did 
not involve in the case of these old Liberals inter- 
national bitterness ; for it is too often forgotten that 
friendship demands independence and equality fully 
as much as war. But in them it led to great interna- 
tional partialities, to a great system, as it were, of 
adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotch- 
man as Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough 
an Englishman as Browning in love with Italy. 

And while on the one side of the struggle was this 
great ideal of energy and variety, on the other side 
was something which we now find it difiicult to real- 
ise or describe. We have seen in our own time a great 
reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, and eccle- 
siasticism, a reaction almost entirely noble in its in- 
stinct, and dwelling almost entirely on the best periods 



88 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

and the best qualities of the old regime. But the 
modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue 
of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and 
the great virtue of reverence which is at the heart of 
ceremonial religion, is not in a position to form any 
idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how astonish- 
ingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and 
devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic sys- 
tems of Europe which survived, and for a time con- 
quered, the Eevolution. The case against the Church in 
Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a 
rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of 
St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against 
the mediaeval Church it might be said that she was too 
fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny 
of man, too indifferent to all things but the devotional 
side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono 
the main thing to be said was that it was simply 
and supremely cynical; that it was not founded on 
the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on the 
worldly counsel to leave life as it is ; that it was not 
the inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, 
but the enemy, the cool and sceptical enemy, of hope 
of any kind or description. The same was true of the 
monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia 
at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy 
of the cavaliers who rode after Charles I. or Louis XIII. 
It was the philosophy of the typical city uncle, advis- 
ing every one, and especially the young, to avoid en- 
thusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, 
dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and 
fear. That was, there can be little doubt, the real 
reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend — that 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 89 

while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a 
despot who went somewhere and did something, and 
defied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word 
" impossible.'^ One does not need to be a Bonapartist 
to rejoice at the way in which the armies of the First 
Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their 
colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of 
Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane. 

Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time 
of the break-up of one part of this frozen continent 
of the non-possumus. Austria's hold in the north of 
Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and 
wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which 
the Holy Alliance had established, and which it be- 
lieved without doubt in its solid unbelief would last 
until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to 
imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would hap- 
pen then. But almost of a sudden affairs had begun 
to move strangely, and the despotic princes and their 
chancellors discovered with a great deal of astonish- 
ment that they were not living in the old age of the 
world, but to all appearance in a very unmanageable 
period of its boyhood. In an age of ugliness and rou- 
tine, in a time when diplomatists and philosophers 
alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human 
types, there began to appear men who belonged to the 
morning of the world, men whose movements have a 
national breadth and beauty, who act symbols and be- 
come legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red 
shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hos- 
tile fort calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not 
a man dared fire a shot at him. Mazzini poured out 
upon Europe a new mysticism of humanity and liberty, 



90 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of the six- 
teenth century, to become in its cause either a philoso- 
pher or a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy 
which was more thrilling and picturesque than war it- 
self. These men had nothing to do with an age of the 
impossible. They have passed, their theories along 
with them, as all things pass ; but since then we have 
had no men of their type precisely, at once large and 
real and romantic and successful. Gordon was a pos- 
sible exception. They were the last of the heroes. 

When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram 
which had been sent to him was stopped on the frontier 
and suppressed on account of his known sympathy with 
the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible for people 
living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how 
a small thing like that will affect a man. It was not 
so much the obvious fact that a great practical injury 
was really done to him ; that the telegram might have 
altered all his plans in matters of vital moment. It 
was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on 
something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like 
this is not the worst tyranny, but it is the most intoler- 
able. It interferes with men not in the most serious 
matters, but precisely in those matters in which they 
most resent interference. It may be illogical for men 
to accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, 
benighted educational systems, bad sanitation, bad 
lighting, a blundering and inefficient system of life, and 
yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a post- 
card ; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men 
is a strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a 
man in the world who would not rather be ruled by 
despots chosen by lot and live in a city like a mediaeval 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 91 

Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to smoke 
another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later ; 
hardly a man who would not feel inclined in such a 
case to raise a rebellion for a caprice for which he did 
not really care a straw. Unmeaning and muddle- 
headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, 
if extended over many years, is harder to bear and 
hope through than the massacres of September. And 
that was the nightmare of vexatious triviality which 
was lying over all the cities of Italy that were ruled by 
the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history 
of the time is full of spiteful and almost childish 
struggles — struggles about the humming of a tune or 
the wearing of a colour, the arrest of a journey, or the 
opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt 
that Browning's temperament under these conditions 
was not of the kind to become more indulgent, and 
there grew in him a hatred of the Imperial and Ducal 
and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed 
the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even trans- 
gressed its spirit. The life which he and his wife lived 
in Italy was extraordinarily full and varied, when we 
consider the restrictions under which one at least of 
them had always lain. They met and took delight, 
notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most in- 
teresting people of their time — Euskin, Cardinal 
Manning, and Lord Lytton. Browning, in a most 
characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of them, 
arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up 
all night by the bedside of a third. 

It has frequently been stated that the only difference 
that ever separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon 
the question of spiritualism. That statement must, of 



92 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

course, be modified and even contradicted if it means 
that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never 
thought an Act of Parliament good when Mrs. Brown- 
ing thought it bad ; that Mr. Browning never thought 
bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. Such 
unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and 
as a matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their 
marriage constituted something like that ideal mar- 
riage, an alliance between two strong and independent 
forces. They differed, in truth, about a great many 
things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. 
Browning regarded with an admiration which would 
have been somewhat beyond the deserts of Sir Galahad, 
and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal princi- 
ples could never pardon for the Coup d^Etat If they 
differed on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way 
than this, the reason must be sought in qualities which 
were deeper and more elemental in both their characters 
than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in her 
excellent Life of Browning, states that the difficulty 
arose from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical 
phenomena and Browning's absolute refusal to believe 
even in their possibility. Another writer who met them 
at this time says, ^^ Browning cannot believe, and 
Mrs. Browning cannot help believing.'' This theory, 
that Browning's aversion to the spiritualist circle arose 
from an absolute denial of the tenability of such a 
theory of life and death, has in fact often been repeated. 
But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with 
Browning's character. He was the last man in the world 
to be intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because 
it was odd. He had friends whose opinions covered 
every description of madness from the French legiti- 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 93 

mism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of 
Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a 
zest for heresies. It is difficult to impute an attitude 
of mere impenetrable negation to a man who had ex- 
pressed vt^ith sympathy the religion of " Caliban " and 
the morality of " Time's Revenges.'^ It is true that at 
this time of the first popular interest in spiritualism a 
feeling existed among many people of a practical turn 
of mind, which can only be called a superstition against 
believing in ghosts. But, intellectually speaking, 
Browning would probably have been one of the most 
tolerant and curious in regard to the new theories, 
whereas the popular version of the matter makes him 
unusually intolerant and negligent even for that time. 
The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion 
to the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with 
spiritualism. It arose from quite a different side of his 
character — his uncompromising dislike of what is called 
Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly cliques, of those 
straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit dubious 
manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of 
all irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see 
what it was that Browning disliked need only do two 
things. First, he should read the Memoirs of David 
Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom 
Browning came in contact. These Memoirs constitute 
a more thorough and artistic self-revelation than any 
monologue that Browning ever wrote. The ghosts, the 
raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are infinitely 
the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part 
of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, 
the moral and intellectual foppery of the composition is 
everywhere, culminating perhaps in the disgusting pas- 



M ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

sage in which Home describes Mrs. Browning as weep- 
ing over him and assuring him that all her husband's 
actions in the matter have been adopted against her 
will. It is in this kind of thing that we find the roots 
of the real anger of Browning. He did not dislike 
spiritualism, but spiritualists. The second point on 
which any one wishing to be just in the matter should 
cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Brown- 
ing insisted on making while on their honeymoon in 
Paris to the house of George Sand. Browning felt, and 
to some extent expressed, exactly the same aversion to 
his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which 
he afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. 
The society was '' of the ragged red, diluted with the 
low theatrical, men who worship George Sand, d genou 
has between an oath and an ejection of saliva." When 
we find that a man did not object to any number of 
Jacobites or Atheists, but objected to the French 
Bohemian poets and to the early occultist mediums as 
friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly right in 
concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a 
social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great 
many admirably Philistine feelings, and one of them 
was a great relish for his responsibilities towards his 
wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is quite a 
distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it 
will scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good 
feelings, it has its possible exaggerations, and one of 
them is this almost morbid healthiness in the choice of 
friends for his wife. 

David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 
1857. Mrs. Browning undoubtedly threw herself into 
psychical experiments with great ardour at first, and 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 96 

Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length 
forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however 
until he had attended one seance at least, at which a 
somewhat ridiculous event occurred, which is described 
in Home's Memoirs with a gravity even more absurd 
than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings 
a wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the 
lights being lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into 
the air, and after hovering for some time, to move 
towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight upon 
her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, 
her husband was observed abruptly to cross the room' 
and stand beside her. One would think it was a 
sufficiently natural action on the part of a man whose 
wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experi- 
ment, genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely 
asserts that it was generally believed that Browning 
had crossed the room in the hope that the wreath 
would alight on his head, and that from the hour of 
its disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his 
goaded and malignant aversion to spiritualism. The 
idea of the very conventional and somewhat bored 
Robert Browning running about the room after a 
wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one 
of the genuine gleams of humour in this rather foolish 
aifair. Browning could be fairly violent, as we know, 
both in poetry and conversation ; but it would be almost 
too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and 
said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head. 

Next day, according to Home's account, he called on 
the hostess of the previous night in what the writer 
calls '' a ridiculous state of excitement," and told her 
apparently that she must excuse him if he and his wife 



96 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

did not attend any more gatherings of tlie kind. What 
actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascer- 
tain, for the account in Home's Memoirs principally 
consists of noble speeches made by the medium which 
would seem either to have reduced Browning to a 
pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his 
attention. But there can be no doubt that the general 
upshot of the affair was that Browning put his foot 
down, and the experiments ceased. There can be little 
doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was 
probably even more justified if the experiments were 
genuine psychical mysteries than if they were the 
hocus-pocus of a charlatan. He knew his wife better 
than posterity can be expected to do ; but even pos- 
terity can see that she was the type of woman so much 
adapted to the purposes of men like Home as to 
exhibit almost invariably either a great craving for 
such experiences or a great terror of them. Like 
many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon 
something like a borderland ; and it is impossible to 
say that if Browning had not interposed when she 
was becoming hysterical she might not have ended 
in an asylum. 

The whole of this incident is very characteristic of 
Browning ; but the real characteristic note in it has, as 
above suggested, been to some extent missed. When 
some seven years afterwards he produced " Mr. Sludge 
the Medium," every one supposed that it was an 
attack upon spiritualism and the possibility of its 
phenomena. As we shall see when we come to that 
poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of it. 
But what is really curious is that most people have 
assumed that a dislike of Homers investigations implies 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 97 

a theoretic disbelief in spiritualism. It might, of 
course, imply a very firm and serious belief in it. As 
a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, 
but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism 
which admitted the reasonableness of such things. 
Home was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous 
swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in pos- 
session of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is 
surely curious to think that a man must object to 
exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks, but could 
not be afraid of exposing her to the loose and name- 
less energies of the universe. 

Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, 
therefore, in all probability quite open and unbiassed. 
His was a peculiarly hospitable intellect. If any one 
had told him of the spiritualist theory, or theories a 
hundred times more insane, as things held by some 
sect of Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Tal- 
mudists at Antwerp, he would have delighted in those 
theories, and would very likely have adopted them. But 
Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round 
a man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send 
her into swoons and trances about which nobody knows 
anything rational or scientific. It was simply the 
stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine feel- 
ings far beyond the reach of argument — things that 
lie so deep that if they are hurt, though there may 
be no blame and no anger, there is always pain. 
Browning did not like spiritualism to be mentioned 
for many years. 

Eobert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly 
conventional man. There are many who think this 
element of conventionality altogether regrettable and 



98 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

disgraceful ; they have established, as it were, a con- 
vention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the 
conventional element in the personality of a poet is 
only possible to those who do not remember the 
meaning of words. Convention means only a coming 
together, an agreement ; and as every poet must base 
his work upon an emotional agreement among men, so 
every poet must base his work upon a convention. 
Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an 
agreement between the speaker and the listener that 
certain objections shall not be raised. The most 
realistic art in the world is open to realistic objection. 
Against the most exact and everyday drama that 
ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the 
realist to raise the objection that the hero who starts 
a subject and drops it, who runs out of a room and 
runs back again for his hat, is all the time behaving 
in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is 
doing these things in a room in which one of the four 
walls has been taken clean away and been replaced by 
a line of footlights and a mob of strangers. Against 
the most accurate black-and-white artist that human 
imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that 
he draws a black line round a man's nose, and that 
that line is a lie. And in precisely the same fashion 
a poet must, by the nature of things, be conventional. 
Unless he is describing an emotion which others share 
with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a 
poet really had an original emotion ; if, for example, 
a poet suddenly fell in love with the buffers of a rail- 
way train, it would take him considerably more time 
than his allotted three-score years and ten to commu- 
nicate his feelings. 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 99 

Poetry deals with primal and conventional things — 
the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of 
children, the desire for immortal life. If men really 
had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. 
If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to 
eat bread ; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, 
original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany 
tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, in- 
stead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with 
a fossil or a sea-anemone, poetry could not express 
him. Poetry can only express what is original in one 
sense — the sense in which we speak of original sin. 
It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, 
but in the deeper sense of being old ; it is original in 
the sense that it deals with origins. 

All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will 
agree so far, that a poet is bound to be conventional 
with regard to matters of art. Unfortunately, how- 
ever, they are the very people who cannot, as a general 
rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional 
in matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who 
sees the poetry of revolt, of isolation, of disagreement ; 
the larger poet sees the poetry of those great agree- 
ments which constitute the romantic achievement of 
civilisation. Just as an agreement between the drama- 
tist and the audience is necessary to every play ; just 
as an agreement between the painter and the specta- 
tors is necessary to every picture, so an agreement is 
necessary to produce the worship of any of the great 
figures of morality — the hero, the saint, the average 
man, the gentleman. Browning had, it must thor- 
oughly be realised, a real pleasure in these great agree- 
ments, these great conventions. He delighted, with a 

;Lcfc. 



100 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

true poetic delight, in being conventional. Being by 
birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an 
Englishman ; being by rank a member of the middle 
class, he took a pride in its ancient scruples and its 
everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he 
was with a definite and conscious pleasure — a man, 
a Liberal, an Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a 
lover, a married man. 

This must always be remembered as a general charac- 
teristic of Browning, this ardent and headlong conven- 
tionality. He exhibited it pre-eminently in the affair 
of his elopement and marriage, during and after the 
escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to 
have forgotten everything, except the splendid worry 
of being married. He showed a thoroughly healthy 
consciousness that he was taking up a responsibility 
which had its practical side. He came finally and en- 
tirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough 
money to live on, he had never thought of himself as 
doing anything but writing poetry ; poetry indeed was 
probably simmering and bubbling in his head day and 
night. But when the problem of the elopement arose 
he threw himself with an energy, of which it is pleas- 
ant to read, into every kind of scheme for solidifying 
his position. He wrote to Monckton Milnes, and would 
appear to have badgered him with applications for a 
post in the British Museum. ^^I will work like a 
horse," he said, with that boyish note, which, when- 
ever in his unconsciousness he strikes it, is more poet- 
ical than all his poems. All his language in this matter 
is emphatic ; he would be " glad and proud," he says, 
'^ to have any minor post " his friend could obtain for 
him. He offered to read for the Bar, and probably be- 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 101 

gan doing so. But all this vigorous and very creditable 
materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth 
Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the 
idea of her husband devoting himself to anything else 
at the expense of poetry. Probably she was right and 
Browning wrong, but it was an error which every man 
would desire to have made. 

One of the qualities again which make Browning 
most charming, is the fact that he felt and expressed so 
simple and genuine a satisfaction about his own achieve- 
ments as a lover and husband, particularly in relation 
to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. " If he 
is vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, '' it is of 
my restored health." Later, she adds with admirable 
humour and suggestiveness, " and I have to tell him 
that he really must not go telling everybody how his 
wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, 
as if a wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." 
When a lady in Italy said, on an occasion when Brown- 
ing stayed behind with his wife on the day of a picnic, 
that he was "the only man who behaved like a Christian 
to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile 
degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of 
the essential manliness and decency of a man than 
this test of his vanities. Browning boasted of being 
domesticated ; there are half a hundred men every- 
where who would be inclined to boast of not being 
domesticated. Bad men are almost without exception 
conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their 
defects. 

One picturesque figure who plays a part in this 
portion of the Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage 
Landor. Browning found him living with some of his 



102 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous and furious 
quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly 
the condition of that remarkable man when living with 
other human beings. He had the double arrogance 
which is only possible to that old and stately, but 
almost extinct blend — the aristocratic republican. 
Like an old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the 
Southern States of America, he had the condescension 
of a gentleman to those below him, combined with the 
jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those above. 
The only person who appears to have been able to 
manage him and bring out his more agreeable side was 
Browning. It is, by the way, one of the many hints 
of a certain element in Browning which can only be 
described by the elementary and old-fashioned word 
goodness, that he always contrived to make himself 
acceptable and even lovable to men of savage and 
capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, 
who could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could 
not get a bitter taste off his tongue in talking of most 
of his contemporaries, was fond of Browning. Landor, 
who could hardly conduct an ordinary business inter- 
view without beginning to break the furniture, was 
fond of Browning. These are things which speak more 
for a man than many people will understand. It is 
easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers, 
especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent 
for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when 
a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual 
stature and of a wholly different type and order of 
eminence, we may be certain that there was something 
genuine about him, and something far more important 
than anything intellectual. Men do not like another 



IV.] BROWNING IN ITALY 103 

man because he is a genius, least of all when they 
happen to be geniuses themselves. This general truth 
about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the 
most famous beauty in a city, and who is at the same 
time adored and confided in by all the women who live 
there. 

Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gen- 
tleman, and helped by Seymour Kirkup put him 
under very definite obligations by a course of very 
generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own 
mind for his trouble by the mere presence and friend- 
ship of Landor, for whose quaint and volcanic person- 
ality he had a vast admiration, compounded of the 
pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a 
hero. It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that 
Mrs. Browning did not share this unlimited enjoyment 
of the company of Mr. Landor, and expressed her feel- 
ings in her own humorous manner. She writes, " Dear, 
darling Eobert amuses me by talking of his gentleness 
and sweetness. A most courteous and refined gentle- 
man he is, of course, and very affectionate to Eobert (as 
he ought to be), but of self-restraint he has not a grain, 
and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say 
to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't 
like what's on it ? Eobert succeeded in soothing him, 
and the poor old lion is very quiet on the whole, roar- 
ing softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics against 
his wife and Louis Napoleon." 

One event alone could really end this endless life of 
the Italian Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 
1861. Eobert Browning's wife died, stricken by the 
death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a charac- 
teristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone 



104 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. iv. 

in the room with Browning, and of what passed then, 
though much has been said, little should be. He, 
closing the door of that room behind him, closed a door 
in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth 
again but only a splendid surface. 



CHAPTER V 

BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 

Browning's confidences, what there were of them, 
immediately after his wife's death, were given to several 
women-friends ; all his life, indeed, he was chiefly in- 
timate with women. The two most intimate of these 
were his own sister, who remained with him in all his 
later years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years 
afterwards passed away in his presence as Elizabeth 
had done. The other letters, which number only one 
or two, referring in any personal manner to his bereave- 
ment, are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. 
He left Florence and remained for a time with his 
father and sister near Dinard. Then he returned to 
London and took up his residence in Warwick Crescent. 
Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly 
lived was the education of his son, and it is charac- 
teristic of Browning that he was not only a very 
indulgent father, but an indulgent father of a very 
conventional type : he had rather the chuckling pride 
of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of 
the intellectual. 

Browning was now famous. "Bells and Pome- 
granates,'' " Men and Women," " Christmas Eve," and 
"Dramatis Personae" had successively glorified his 
Italian period. But he was already brooding half- 

105 



106 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

unconsciously on more famous things. He has him- 
self left on record a description of the incident out of 
which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest 
achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar 
sense of material things, all that power of writing 
of stone or metal or the fabric of drapery, so that we 
seem to be handling and smelling them, he has de- 
scribed a stall for the selling of odds and ends of 
every variety of utility and uselessness : — 

** picture frames 
White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, 
Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, 
(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) 
Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, 
Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry 
Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts 
In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised !) 
A wreck of tapestry proudly -purposed web. 
When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, 
Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet 
(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost). 

Vulgarized Horace for the use of schools, 

* The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody, 

Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life ' — 

With this one glance at the lettered back of which. 

And * Stall,' cried I ; a lira made it mine." 

This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of 
debris, and comes nearer than any other poem has done 
to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low- 
class pawnshop. " This," which Browning bought for 
a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the 
old Latin record of the criminal case of Guido 
Franceschini, tried for the murder of his wife Pom- 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 107 

pilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is scarcely- 
necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of 
The Ring and the Book, 

Browning had picked up the volume and partly 
planned the poem during his wife's lifetime in Italy. 
But the more he studied it, the more the dimensions 
of the theme appeared to widen and deepen ; and he 
came at last, there can be little doubt, to regard it 
definitely as his magnum opus to which he would devote 
many years to come. Then came the great sorrow of 
his life, and he cast about him for something suffi- 
ciently immense and arduous and complicated to keep 
his brain going like some huge and automatic engine. 
"I mean to keep writing," he said, "whether I like it 
or not." And thus finally he took up the scheme of 
the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale 
with a degree of elaboration, repetition, and manage- 
ment, and inexhaustible scholarship which was never 
perhaps before given in the history of the world to an 
affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary 
and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in 
reference to its curious and original form of narration, 
I shall speak subsequently. But there is one pecu- 
liarity about the story which has more direct bearing 
on Browning's life, and it appears singular that few, 
if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity 
is the extraordinary resemblance between the moral 
problem involved in the poem if understood in its 
essence, and the moral problem which constituted the 
crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, 
properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after 
his wife's death ; and his greatest work during that 
time was the telling, under alien symbols and the veil 



108 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

of a wholly different story, the inner truth about his 
own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in 
this sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the 
supreme difficulty of having to trust himself to the 
reality of virtue not only without the reward, but 
even without the name of virtue. He had, like 
Caponsacchi, preferred what was unselfish and dubious 
to what was selfish and honourable. He knew better 
than any man that there is little danger of men who 
really know anything of that naked and homeless 
responsibility seeking it too of ten or indulging it too 
much. The conscientiousness of the law-abider is 
nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness of the 
conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for 
what he seriously believed to be a greater good, done 
what he himself would never have had the cant to deny, 
ought to be called deceit and evasion. Such a thing 
ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds that 
necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the 
beginning of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, 
and he devoted his greatest poem to a suggestion of 
how such a necessity may come to any man who is 
worthy to live. 

As has already been suggested, any apparent danger 
that there may be in this excusing of an exceptional 
act is counteracted by the perils of the act, since it 
must always be remembered that this kind of act has 
the immense difference from all legal acts — that it can 
only be justified by success. If Browning had taken 
his wife to Paris, and she had died in an hotel there, we 
can only conceive him saying, with the bitter emphasis 
of one of his own lines, '^ How should I have borne me, 
please ? '' Before and after this event his life was as 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 109 

tranquil and casual a one as it would be easy to 
imagine; but there always remained upon him some- 
thing which was felt by all who knew him in after 
years — the spirit of a man who had been ready when 
his time came, and had walked in his own devotion 
and certainty in a position counted indefensible and 
almost along the brink of murder. This great moral 
of Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine 
of the great hour, enters, of course, into many poems 
besides The Ring and the Booh, and is indeed the main- 
spring of a great part of his poetry taken as a whole. 
It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, " The 
Statue and the Bust,^' which has given a great deal of 
distress to a great many people because of its supposed 
invasion of recognised morality. It deals, as every one 
knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an elopement which 
he planned with the bride of one of the Eiccardi. The 
lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more 
or less comprehensible reasons of convenience ; but the 
habit of shrinking from the final step grows steadily 
upon them, and they never take it, but die, as it were, 
waiting for each other. The objection that the act 
thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and 
quite clearly answered by Browning himself. His 
case against the dilatory couple is not in the least 
affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is 
that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated 
in them by cowardice, which is probably the worse 
immorality of the two. The same idea again may be 
found in that delightful lyric " Youth and Art,^' where 
a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor 
with their failure to understand each other in their 
youth and poverty. 



110 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

** Each life unfulfilled, you see ; 
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy : 
We have not sighed deep, laughed free. 
Starved, feasted, despaired, — been happy." 

And this conception of the great hour which breaks out 
everywhere in Browning it is ahnost impossible not 
to connect with his own internal drama. It is really 
curious that this correspondence has not been insisted 
on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that 
Browning in many places appears to boast that he is 
purely dramatic, that he has never put himself into his 
work, a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever 
lived could possibly avoid doing. 

The enormous scope and seriousness of The Ring and 
the Book occupied Browning for some five or six years, 
and the great epic appeared in the winter of 1868. 
Just before it was published Smith and Elder brought 
out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to 
that time, and the two incidents taken together may be 
considered to mark the final and somewhat belated 
culmination of Browning's literary fame. The years 
since his wife's death, that had been covered by the 
writing of Tlie Ring and the Book, had been years of an 
almost feverish activity in that and many other ways. 
His travels had been restless and continued, his industry 
immense, and for the first time he began that mode of 
life which afterwards became so characteristic of him — 
the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower 
and more sentimental type would have professed to 
find the life of dinner-tables and soirees vain and un- 
satisfying to a poet, and especially to a poet in mourn- 
ing. But if there is one thing more than another 
which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 111 

the entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. 
He had the one great requirement of a poet — he was 
not difficult to please. The life of society was super- 
ficial, but it is only very superficial people who object 
to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvel- 
lousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as 
strange and magical as its interior ; clearness and 
plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries. 
The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, 
is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as 
incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming. 

A great many literary persons have expressed 
astonishment at, or even disapproval of, this social 
frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these literary 
people would have been shocked if Browning's in- 
terest in humanity had led him into a gambling hell 
in the Wild West or a low tavern in Paris ; but it 
seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable people are 
not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and 
dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional 
reformers go to look for humanity in remote places 
and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of a more vivid 
type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in 
thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. 
But humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets 
and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at 
all. For them alone among all men the nearest 
drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own 
families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by 
buying a house in his own native town and talking to 
the townsmen. Browning was invited to a great many 
conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend 
that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this 



112 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

period of his life he describes his first dinner at one 
of the Oxford colleges with an unaffected delight and 
vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so much 
as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he 
were invited to a similar function and received a few 
compliments. It may be indeed that Browning had a 
kind of second youth in this long-delayed social recog- 
nition, but at least he enjoyed his second youth nearly 
as much as his first, and it is not every one who can 
do that. 

Of Browning's actual personality and presence in 
this later middle age of his, memories are still sujfi- 
ciently clear. He was a middle-sized, well set up, erect 
man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as almost 
all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. 
The beard, the removal of which his wife had resented 
with so quaint an indignation, had grown again, but 
grown quite white, which, as she said when it occurred, 
was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. His hair 
was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this 
time must have been very well represented by Mr. 
G. F. Watts' fine portrait in the National Portrait 
Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many testimo- 
nies which exist to Mr. Watts' grasp of the essential 
of character, for it is the only one of the portraits of 
Browning in which we get primarily the air of virility, 
even of animal virility, tempered but not disguised, 
with a certain touch of the pallor of the brain-worker. 
He looks here what he was — a very healthy man, too 
scholarly to live a completely healthy life. 

His manner in society, as has been more than once 
indicated, was that of a man anxious if anything, to 
avoid the air of intellectual eminence. Lockhart said 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 113 

briefly, ^^ I like Browning ; he isn't at all like a damned 
literary man.'' He was, according to some, upon 
occasion, talkative and noisy to a fault; but there 
are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation. 
The first kind are those who like the sound of their 
own voice; the second are those who do not know 
what the sound of their own voice is like. Browning 
was one of the latter class. His volubility in speech 
had the same origin as his voluminousness and ob- 
scurity in literature — a kind of headlong humility. 
He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked 
people down or have wished to do so. For this would 
have been precisely a violation of the ideal of the man 
of the world, the one ambition and even weakness that 
he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he 
never in the full sense was one. He remained a little 
too much of a boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, 
and a little too much of what may be called a man of 
the universe, to be a man of the world. 

One of his faults probably was the thing roughly 
called prejudice. On the question, for example, of 
table-turning and psychic phenomena he was in a 
certain degree fierce and irrational. He was "not 
indeed, as we shall see when we come to study 
^^ Sludge the Medium," exactly prejudiced against 
spiritualism. But he was beyond all question stub- 
bornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the 
medium Home was or was not a scoundrel it is some- 
what difficult in our day to conjecture. But in so far 
as he claimed supernatural powers, he may have been 
as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we 
think that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of 
a man of dubious character, we can still feel that 



114 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

Browning might have achieved his purpose without 
making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces 
again, though much fainter ones, may be found of 
something like a subconscious hostility to the Roman 
Church, or at least a less full comprehension of the 
grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than might 
have been expected of a man of Browning's great imag- 
inative tolerance, ^stheticism, Bohemianism, the ir- 
responsibilities of the artist, the untidy morals of Grub 
Street and the Latin Quarter, he hated with a consuming 
hatred. He was himself exact in everything, from his 
scholarship to his clothes ; and even when he wore the 
loose white garments of the lounger in Southern Eu- 
rope, they were in their own way as precise as a dress 
suit. This extra carefulness in all things he defended 
against the cant of Bohemianism as the right attitude 
for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or 
negligence on the ground of genius, he said, " That is 
an error : Noblesse oblige.'' 

Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether 
to that healthy order which is characterised by a 
cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It never does a man 
any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows 
nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we 
do know something about it which corrodes the char- 
acter. We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards 
people we have never met, and a profound and manly 
dislike of the authors we have never read. It does 
not harm a man to be certain before opening the books 
that Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson 
is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can 
think these things after he has read the books who 
must be in a fair way to mental perdition. Prejudice, 



T.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 115 

in fact, is not so much the great iDtellectual sin as a 
thing which we may call, to coin a word, " postjudice," 
not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that 
remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and 
emphatic nature the bias was almost always formed 
before he had gone into the matter. But almost all 
the men he really knew he admired, almost all the 
books he had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre- 
eminent among those great universalists who praised 
the ground they trod on and commended existence 
like any other material, in its samples. He had no 
kinship with those new and strange universalists of 
the type of Tolstoi who praise existence to the exclu- 
sion of all the institutions they have lived under, and 
all the ties they have known. He thought the world 
good because he had found so many things that were 
good in it — religion, the nation, the family, the social 
class. He did not, like the new humanitarian, think 
the world good because he had found so many things 
in it that were bad. 

As has been previously suggested, there was some- 
thing very queer and dangerous that underlay all the 
good humour of Browning. If one of these idle pre- 
judices were broken by better knowledge, he was all 
the better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that 
were really rooted in him were trodden on, even by 
accident, such as his aversion to loose artistic cliques, 
or his aversion to undignified publicity, his rage was 
something wholly transfiguring and alarming, some- 
thing far removed from the shrill disapproval of 
Carlyle and Euskin. It can only be said that he be- 
came a savage, and not always a very agreeable or pre- 
sentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon 



116 ROBERT BROWNmG [chap. 

the bones of Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which 
ought not to have astonished any one who had known 
much of Browning's character or even of his work. 
Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had 
obtained some of Mrs. Browning's letters shortly after 
her death, and proposed to write a Life founded upon 
them. They ought to have understood that Browning 
would probably disapprove ; but if he talked to them 
about it, as he did to others, and it is exceedingly 
probable that he did, they must have thought he was 
mad. " What I suffer with the paws of these black- 
guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again 
he writes : " Think of this beast working away, not 
deeming my feelings, or those of her family, worthy of 
notice. It shall not be done if I can stop the scamp's 
knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning 
actually resorted to this extreme course is unknown ; 
nothing is known except that he wrote a letter to the 
ambitious biographer which reduced him to silence, 
probably from stupefaction. . 

The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have 
been apparent to any one who knew anything of 
Browning's literary work. A great number of his 
poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature 
it is more or less impossible to give examples. Suf- 
fice it to say that it is truly extraordinary that 
poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross word) 
should have been spoken of as if they had introduced 
moral license into Victorian poetry. What the Non- 
conformist conscience has been doing to have passed 
Browning is something difficult to imagine. But the 
peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is 
this — that it is always used to express a certain whole- 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 117 

some fury and contempt for things sickly, or ungener- 
ous, or unmanly. The poet seems to feel that there are 
some things so contemptible that you can only speak 
of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and 
perhaps undesirable, to give examples ; but it may be 
noted that the same brutal physical metaphor is used 
by his Caponsacchi about the people who could imagine 
Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in " At the 
Mermaid, '^ about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter 
into the heart of humanity. In both cases Browning 
feels, and perhaps in a manner rightly, that the best 
thing we can do with a sentiment essentially base is to 
strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that 
the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the 
poison of Sterne. Herein again Browning is close to 
the average man ; and to do the average man justice, 
there is a great deal more of this Brovniingesque hatred 
of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than 
many people suppose. 

Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the 
man who, in the full summer and even the full autumn 
of his intellectual powers, began to grow upon the con- 
sciousness of the English literary world about this 
time. For the first time friendship grew between him 
and the other great men of his time. Tennyson, for 
whom he then and always felt the best and most 
personal kind of admiration, came into his life, and 
along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There 
began to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a 
man is to some extent made a classic in his lifetime, 
so that he is honoured even if he is unread. He was 
made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the 
great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly 



118 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

until his death, despite many refusals on his part. He 
was unanimously elected Lord Kector of Glasgow 
University in 1875. He declined owing to his deep 
and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public 
speaking, and in 1877 he had to decline on similar 
grounds the similar offer from the University of St. 
Andrews. He was much at the English universities, 
was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university 
life at the age of sixty-three in a way that he probably 
would not have enjoyed it if he had ever been to a 
university. The great universities would not let him 
alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of 
Cambridge in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. 
When he received these honours there were, of course, 
the traditional buffooneries of the undergraduates, and 
one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly on 
his head as he passed under the gallery. Some in- 
dignant intellectuals wrote to him to protest against 
this affront, but Browning took the matter in the best 
and most characteristic way. " You are far too hard,^' 
he wrote in answer, " on the very harmless drolleries 
of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly 
appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose 
business it was to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones 
by way of reminder that all human glories are merely 
gilded baubles and must not be fancied metal.'' In 
this there are other and deeper things characteristic of 
Browning besides his learning and humour. In dis- 
cussing anything, he must always fall back upon great 
speculative and eternal ideas. Even in the tomfoolery 
of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a symbol 
of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of 
morals. The young men themselves were probably 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 119 

unaware that they were the representatives of the 
^^Filius Terrae." 

But the years during which Browning was thus 
reaping some of his late laurels began to be filled with 
incidents that reminded him how the years were pass- 
ing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, 
a man of whom it is impossible to think without a 
certain emotion, a man who had lived quietly and 
persistently for others, to whom Browning owed more 
than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability 
mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest 
friends, Arabella Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as 
her sister had done, alone with Browning. Browning 
was not a superstitious man; he somewhat stormily 
prided himself on the contrary ; but he notes at this 
time " a dream which Arabella had of Her, in which 
she prophesied their meeting in five years,'' that is, 
of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and Arabella. 
His friend Milsand, to whom Sordello was dedicated, 
died in 1886. " I never knew,'' said Browning, " or ever 
shall know, his like among men." But though both 
fame and a growing isolation indicated that he was pass- 
ing towards the evening of his days, though he bore traces 
of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and 
a greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, 
one thing continued in him with unconquerable energy 
— there was no diminution in the quantity, no abate- 
ment in the immense designs of his intellectual output. 

In 1871 he produced Balaustion^s Adventure^ a work 
exhibiting not only his genius in its highest condition 
of power, but something more exacting even than 
genius to a man of his mature and changed life, im- 
mense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough 



120 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

assimilation of the vast literature of a remote civilisa- 
tion. Balaustion^s Adventure, which is, of course, the 
mere framework for an English version of the Alcestis 
of Euripides, is an illustration of one of Browning's 
finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic ad- 
miration. Those who knew him tell us that in conver- 
sation he never revealed himself so impetuously or so 
brilliantly as when declaiming the poetry of others; 
and Balaustion^s Adventure is a monument of this fiery 
self-f orgetf ulness. It is penetrated with the passionate 
desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imita- 
tion are for the time being devoted all the gigantic 
powers which went to make the songs of Pippa and the 
last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself into 
anything more powerfully or more successfully ; yet it 
is only an excellent translation. In the uncouth 
philosophy of Caliban, in the tangled ethics of Sludge, 
in his wildest satire, in his most feather-headed lyric. 
Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than 
in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived 
excitement in Greek matters ; ^^ his passionate love of 
the Greek language ^' continued in him thenceforward 
till his death. He published more than one poem on 
the drama of Hellas. Aristophanes' Apology came out in 
1875, and The Agamemnon of ^schylus, another para- 
phrase, in 1877. AH three poems are marked by the 
same primary characteristic, the fact that the writer 
has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. 
He is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, 
but with their frivolity and their slang ; he knows not 
only Athenian wisdom, but Athenian folly; not only 
the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. In fact, 
a page of Aristophanes' Apology is like a page of 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 121 

Aristophanes, dark with, levity and as obscure as a 
schoolman's treatise, with its load of jokes. 

In 1871 also appeared Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau : 
Saviour of Society, one of the finest and most 
picturesque of all Browning's apologetic monologues. 
The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon III., 
whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his 
country with it. The saying has been often quoted 
that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe twice — once when 
he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he 
made it think he was a statesman. It might be added 
that Europe was never quite just to him, and was 
deceived a third time, when it took him after his fall 
for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the 
general chorus of contempt which was raised over his 
weak and unscrupulous policy in later years, culminat- 
ing in his great disaster, there are few things finer than 
this attempt of Browning's to give the man a platform 
and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of 
a political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a 
kind peculiarly open to popular condemnation. Man- 
kind has always been somewhat inclined to forgive the 
adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but there is 
nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely 
preserves. We have sympathy with the rebel who 
aims at reconstruction, but there is something repugnant 
to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in the name 
of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather 
to interpret a man, who kidnapped politicians in the 
night and deluged the Montmartre with blood, not for 
an ideal, not for a reform, not precisely even for a 
cause, but simply for the establishment of a regime. 
He did these hideous things not so much that he might 



122 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

be able to do better ones, but that he and every one 
else might be able to do nothing for twenty years ; and 
Browning's contention, and a very plausible contention, 
is that the criminal believed that his crime would 
establish order and compromise, or, in other words, 
that he thought that nothing was the very best thing 
he and his people could do. There is something 
peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus selecting 
not only a political villain, but what would appear the 
most prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find 
in Browning a defence of those obvious and easily 
defended publicans and sinners whose mingled virtues 
and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama — 
the generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong 
man too great for parochial morals. He was in a yet 
more solitary sense the friend of the outcast. He took 
^in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He went 
with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee. 

How little this desire of Browning's, to look for 
a moment at the man's life with the man's eyes, 
was understood, may be gathered from the criticisms 
on Hohenstiel-Schivangau, which, says Browning, " the 
Editor of the Edinburgh Review calls my eulogium on 
the Second Empire, which it is not, any more than 
what another wiseacre affirms it to be, a scandalous 
attack on the old constant friend of England. It is 
just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say 
for himself." 

In 1873 appeared Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, 
which, if it be not absolutely one of the finest 
of Browning's poems, is certainly one of the most 
magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name 
of the poem is probably well known. He was travel- 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 123 

ling along the Normandy coast, and discovered what 
he called 

*' Meek, hitherto un- Murray ed bathing-places, 
Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy ! '* 

Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Brown- 
ing beyond measure by calling the sleepy old fishing 
district " White Cotton Night-Cap Country/^ It was 
exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which Browning 
had, it must always be remembered, a quite uncon- 
querable attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, 
where men and women walked about in night-caps, a 
nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing that 
Browning in his heart loved better than Paradise Lost. 
Some time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very 
painful story of profligacy and suicide which greatly 
occupied the French journals in the year 1871, and 
which had taken place in the same district. It is 
worth noting that Browning was one of those wise 
men who can perceive the terrible and impressive 
poetry of the police-news, which is commonly treated 
as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be undesir- 
able, but is certainly not vulgar. From Tlie Ring 
and the Book to Red Cotton Night-Cap Country a 
great many of his works might be called magnificent 
detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and 
its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can 
only make ugliness uglier. And in this poem there 
is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret 
wealth of valour and patience in humanity which 
makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vile- 
ness in TJie Ring and the Book, It almost looks at first 
sight as if Browning had for a moment surrendered 



124 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

the whole of his impregnable philosophical position 
and admitted the strange heresy that a human story- 
can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, 
a mistake. It was written in something which, for 
want of a more exact word, we must call one of the 
bitter moods of Browning; but the bitterness is en- 
tirely the product of a certain generous hostility 
against the class of morbidities which he really de- 
tested, sometimes more than they deserved. In this 
poem these principles of weakness and evil are em- 
bodied to him as the sicklier kind of Eomanism, and 
the more sensual side of the French temperament. We 
must never forget what a great deal of the Puritan 
there remained in Browning to the end. This outburst 
of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It 
says in effect, " You call this a country of sleep, I call 
it a country of death. You call it ^ White Cotton 
Night-Cap Country ^ ; I call it ' Ked Cotton Night-Cap 
Country.' ' ■ 

Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published Fijine 
at the Fair, which his principal biographer, and one 
of his most uncompromising admirers, calls a piece of 
perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be to some 
extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether 
Browning would or would not be perplexing even in 
a love-song or a post-card. But cynicism is a word 
that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to 
anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes 
that condition of mind in which we hold that life is 
in its nature mean and arid; that no soul contains 
genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine 
reliability. Fijine at the Fair, like Prince Hohenstiel- 
Schwangau, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies 



T.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 125 

— the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half -playfully 
to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which 
he afterwards actually falls. This casuist, like all 
Browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts 
and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the 
poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand 
what particular connection there is between seeing good 
in nobody and seeing good even in a sensual fool. 

After Fifine at the Fair appeared the Inn Album, 
in 1875, a purely narrative work, chiefly interesting 
as exhibiting in yet another place one of Browning's 
vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and inter- 
preting actual events of a sinister and criminal type ; 
and after the Inn Album came what is perhaps the 
most preposterously individual thing he ever wrote, 
Of PacchiarottOy and Hoio He Worked in Distemper, in 
1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and 
it is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its 
chief characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an 
energy that has nothing intellectual or even intelligible 
about it, a purely animal energy of words. Not only 
is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it 
carries the reader away as he might be carried away 
by romping children. It ends up with a voluble and 
largely unmeaning malediction upon the poet's critics, 
a malediction so outrageously good-humoured that it 
does not take the trouble even to make itself clear to 
the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem 
to nothing in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat 
humorous, more or less benevolent, and most incom- 
prehensible catalogues of curses and oaths which may 
be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind 
of thing, and it goes on for pages : — 



126 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

** Long after the last of your number 
Has ceased my front-court to encumber 
While, treading down rose and ranunculus, 
You Tommy-make'room-for-your-uncle-xis I 
Troop, all of you man or homunculus. 
Quick march ! for Xanthippe, my housemaid, 
If once on your pates she a souse made 
With what, pan or pot, bowl or skoramis, 
First comes to her hand — things were more amiss ! 
I would not for worlds be your place in — 
Recipient of slops from the basin ! 
You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness 
Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness 1 " 

You can only call this, in the most literal sense of 
the word, the brute-force of language. 

In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, 
which gives its title to the volume, it contains some of 
the most beautiful verses that Browning ever wrote 
in that style of light philosophy in which he was 
unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and 
artistically what is too loosely talked about as a thrill, 
as the poem called ^^ Fears and Scruples,^' in which a 
man describes the mystifying conduct of an absent 
friend, and reserves to the last line the climax — 

** Hush, I pray you ! 
What if this friend happen to be ■— God." 

It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused 
literary quality Sensationalism. 

The volume entitled Pacchiarotto, moreover, includes 
one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject 
of the poet in relation to publicity — ^^At the Mer- 
maid,'' " House,'' and '' Shop." 

In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 127 

if anything to come thicker and faster. Two were 
published in 1878 — La Saisiaz, his great metaphysi- 
cal poem on the conception of immortality, and that 
delightfully foppish fragment of the ancien regime 
The Two Poets of Croisic, Those two poems would 
alone suffice to show that he had not forgotten the 
hard science of theology or the harder science of 
humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the 
first series of Dramatic IdylSy which contain such 
masterpieces as ^^ Pheidippides " and "Ivan Ivano- 
vitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series 
of DramcUic Idyls, including "Muleykeh^' and ^^ Olive," 
possibly the two best stories in poetry, told in the 
best manner of story-telling. Then only did the mar- 
vellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, but never 
in quality. " Jocoseria " did not appear till 1883. It 
contains among other things a cast-back to his very 
earliest manner in the lyric of " Never the Time and 
the Place," which we may call the most light-hearted 
love-song that was ever written by a man over seventy. 
In the next year appeared Ferishtah^s Fancies, which 
exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, ex- 
pressed in some of his quaintest and most characteristic 
images. Here perhaps more than anywhere else we 
see that supreme peculiarity of Browning — his sense 
of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous prob- 
lems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, 
prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested 
by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle 
flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. 
It is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really 
characterises Browning among all other poets. Other 
poets might possibly have hit upon the same philo- 



128 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

sophical idea — some idea as deep, as delicate, and as 
spiritual. But it may be safely asserted that no other 
poet having thought of a deep, delicate, and spiritual 
idea would call it "A Bean Stripe ; also Apple Eating.'' 
Three more years passed, and the last book which 
Browning published in his lifetime, was Parleyings ivith 
Certain People of Importance in their Day, a book which 
consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, 
satirical, emotional, to a number of people of whom the 
vast majority even of cultivated people have never 
heard in their lives — Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, 
Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison. This extraor- 
dinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a 
thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even 
when he was unfortunate in every other literary quality. 
Apart altogether from every line he ever wrote, it may 
fairly be said that no mind so rich as his ever carried 
its treasures to the grave. All these later poems 
are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are 
thoroughly characteristic of their author. But nothing 
in them is quite so characteristic of their author as this 
fact, that when he had published all of them, and was 
already near to his last day, he turned with the energy 
of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things in 
the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the 
boyish poem that he had written fifty-five years before. 
Here was a man covered with glory and near to the 
doors of death, who was prepared to give himself the 
elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and re- 
building the verses of a long juvenile poem which had 
been forgotten for fifty years in the blaze of successive 
victories. It is such things as these which give to 
Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 129 

the mere interest of genius. It was of sucli things that 
Elizabeth Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of 
insight — that his genius was the least important thing 
about him. 

During all these later years, Browning's life had 
been a quiet and regular one. He always spent the 
winter in Italy and the summer in London, and carried 
his old love of precision to the extent of never failing 
day after day throughout the year to leave the house at 
the same time. He had by this time become far more 
of a public figure than he had ever been previously, 
both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. Furnivall and 
Miss E. H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning 
Society." He became President of the new " Shake- 
speare Society'' and of the "Wordsworth Society." 
In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he accepted 
the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Eoyal 
Academy. When he moved to De Vere Gardens in 
1887, it began to be evident that he was slowly 
breaking up. He still dined out constantly ; he still 
attended every reception and private view ; he still 
corresponded prodigiously, and even added to his cor- 
respondence ; and there is nothing more typical of him 
than that now, when he was almost already a classic, 
he answered any compliment with the most delightful 
vanity and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George 
Bainton, touching style, he makes a remark which is 
an excellent criticism on his whole literary career: 
"I myself found many forgotten fields which have 
proved the richest of pastures." But despite his con- 
tinued energy, his health was gradually growing worse. 
He was a strong man in a muscular, and ordinarily in 
a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense a 



130 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain- 
excitement prolonged through a lifetime. In these 
closing years he began to feel more constantly the 
necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live at a 
little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together 
talking and drinking tea on the lawn. He himself 
writes in one of his quaint and poetic phrases that he 
had come to love these long country retreats, " another 
term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet 
starry Sunday at the little church." For the first time, 
and in the last two or three years, he was really 
growing old. On one point he maintained always a 
tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic 
school of poetry was growing up all round him ; the 
decadents with their belief that art was only a counting 
of the autumn leaves were approaching more and more 
towards their tired triumph and their tasteless popu- 
larity. But Browning would not for one instant take 
the scorn of them out of his voice. " Death, death, it 
is this harping on death that I despise so much. In 
fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, and I am 
told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow 
of death, call it what you will, despair, negation, 
indifference, is upon us. But what fools who talk 
thus ! Why, amico mio, you know as well as I, that 
death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying 
body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new 
forces of existence. Without death, which is our 
church-yardy crape-like word for change, for growth, 
there could be no prolongation of that which we call 
life. Never say of me that I am dead." 

On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for 
Italy, the last of his innumerable voyages. During his 



v.] BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 131 

last Italian period he seems to have fallen back on 
very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at 
nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox 
cub, and Browning would spend hours with it watching 
its grotesque ways ; when it escaped, he was character- 
istically enough delighted. The old man could be 
seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into 
hedges and whistling for the lizards. 

This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest 
of slopes into death, was suddenly diversified by a 
flash of something lying far below. Browning's eye 
fell upon a passage written by the distinguished 
Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many 
years, in which Fitzgerald spoke in an uncompli- 
mentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
Browning immediately wrote the ^^ Lines to Edward 
Fitzgerald," and set the whole literary world in an 
uproar. The lines were bitter and excessive to have 
been written against any man, especially bitter and 
excessive to have been written against a man who was 
not alive to reply. And yet, when all is said, it is 
impossible not to feel a certain dark and indescribable 
pleasure in this last burst of the old barbaric energy. 
The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid 
out in gardens to the summit; but for one last 
night it had proved itself once more a volcano, and 
had lit up all the plains with its forgotten fire. And 
the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that great 
central sanctity — the story of a man's youth. All that 
the old man would say in reply to every view of the 
question was, '' I felt as if she had died yesterday." 

Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, 
where he fell ill. He took very little food; it was 



132 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. v. 

indeed one of his peculiar small fads that men should 
not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he 
maintained that the animals were more sagacious. 
He asserted vigorously that this somewhat singular 
regimen would pull him through, talked about his 
plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the 
talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness 
passed into a kind of placidity ; and without any 
particular crisis or sign of the end, Eobert Browning 
died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken 
on board ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and 
received by the Royal Italian marines. He was buried 
in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, the choir 
singing his wife's poem, ^^He giveth His beloved 
sleep." On the day that he died "Asolando" was 
published. 



CHAPTER VI 

BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 

Mr. William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, quotes 
the remarks of another critic to the following effect : 
" The poet's processes of thought are scientific in their 
precision and analysis ; the sudden conclusion that he 
imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." 

This is a very fair but a very curious example of 
the way in which Browning is treated. For what is 
the state of affairs ? A man publishes a series of 
poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics 
read them, and they decide that he has failed as a 
poet, but that he is a remarkable philosopher and 
logician. They then proceed to examine his philoso- 
phy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilo- 
sophieal, and to examine his logic and show with great 
triumph that it is not logical, but " transcendental and 
inept." In other words. Browning is first denounced 
for being a logician and not a poet, and then denounced 
for insisting on being a poet when they have decided 
that he is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were 
to say first that a garden was so neglected that it was 
only fit for a boys' playground, and then complain of 
the unsuitability in a boys' playground of rockeries 
and flower-beds. 

As we find; after this manner, that Browning does 

133 



134 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

not act satisfactorily as that which we have decided 
that he shall be — a logician — it might possibly be 
worth while to make another attempt to see whether he 
may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to 
what he himself professed to be — a poet. And if we 
study this seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon 
come to a conclusion. It is a gross and complete 
slander upon Browning to say that his processes of 
thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. 
They are nothing of the sort ; if they were, Browning 
could not be a good poet. The critic speaks of the 
conclusions of a poem as " transcendental and inept '' ; 
but the conclusions of a poem, if they are not trans- 
cendental, must be inept. Do the people who call 
one of Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise 
the meaning of what they say ? One is tempted to 
think that they know a scientific analysis when 
they see it as little as they know a good poem. The 
one supreme difference between the scientific method 
and the artistic method is, roughly speaking, simply 
this — that a scientific statement means the same thing 
wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an 
artistic statement means something entirely different, 
according to the relation in which it stands to its 
surroundings. The remark, let us say, that the whale 
is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces go to 
a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same 
thing whether we state it at the beginning of a con- 
versation or at the end, whether we print it in a 
dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if we take 
some phrase commonly used in the art of literature — 
such a sentence, for the sake of example, as " the dawn 
was breaking " — the matter is quite different. If the 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 135 

sentence came at the beginning of a short story, it 
might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the 
last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with 
some peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read 
Browning's great monologues and not feel that they 
are built up like a good short story, entirely on this 
principle of the value of language arising from its 
arrangement? Take such an example as "Caliban 
upon Setebos,'^ a wonderful poem designed to describe 
the way in which a primitive nature may at once be 
afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. Caliban 
in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural 
and obvious parallel between the deity and himself, 
carries out the comparison with consistency and an 
almost revolting simplicity, and ends in a kind of 
blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, bas- 
ing his conduct not merely on the greatness and wis- 
dom, but also on the manifest weaknesses and 
stupidities of the Creator of all things. Then sud- 
denly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, 
and the profane speculator falls flat upon his face — 

'* Lo 1 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos ! 
'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, 
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month 
One little mass of whelks, so he may 'scape 1 " 

Surely it would be very difl6.cult to persuade oneself 
that this thunderstorm would have meant exactly the 
same thing if it had occurred at the beginning of 
" Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean the same 
thing, but something very different ; and the deduction 
from this is the curious fact that Browning is an 
artist, and that consequently his processes of thought 
are not " scientific in their precision and analysis." 



136 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none 
in the face of the poems themselves can be even intelli- 
gible which is not based upon the fact that he was 
successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate 
artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do 
not think so ; that is quite a different matter. But it 
is one thing to say that a man through vanity or 
ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite another 
to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and 
did not know whether he was building a lighthouse or 
a first-class hotel. Browning knew perfectly well what 
he was doing ; and if the reader does not like his art, at 
least the author did. The general sentiment expressed 
in the statement that he did not care about form is 
simply the most ridiculous criticism that could be 
conceived. It would be far nearer the truth to say 
that he cared more for form than any other English 
poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and 
modelling and inventing new forms. Among all his 
two hundred to three hundred poems it would scarcely 
be an exaggeration to say that there are half as many 
different metres as there are different poems. 

The great English poets who are supposed to have 
cared more for form than Browning did, cared less at 
least in this sense — that they were content to use old 
forms so long as they were certain that they had new 
ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a 
new idea than he tried to make a new form to express 
it. Wordsworth and Shelley were really original poets ; 
their attitude of thought and feeling marked without 
doubt certain great changes in literature and philoso- 
phy. Nevertheless, the ^' Ode on the Intimations of 
Immortality " is a perfectly normal and traditional ode, 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 137 

and "Prometheus Unbound '^ is a perfectly genuine 
and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study 
Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that 
he really created a large number of quite novel and 
quite admirable artistic forms. It is too often forgot- 
ten what and how excellent these were. Hie Ring and 
the Bookf for example, is an illuminating departure in 
literary method — the method of telling the same story 
several times and trusting to the variety of human 
character to turn it into several different and equally 
interesting stories. Pippa Passes, to take another 
example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of 
detached dramas connected only by the presence of one 
fugitive and isolated figure. The invention of these 
things is not merely like the writing of a good poem — 
it is something like the invention of the sonnet or the 
Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not 
merely create himself — he creates other poets. It is 
so in a degree long past enumeration with regard to 
Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and horrible 
lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is 
absolutely original, with its weird and almost blood- 
curdling echo verses, mocking echoes indeed — 

*' And dipt of his wings in Paris square, 
They bring him now to be burned alive. 
\_And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern, 
ye shall say to confirm him xoho singeth — 
We bring John now to be burned alive." 
A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's 
^^ Sonnet on his Blindness," or Keats' "Ode on a Grecian 
Urn," are both thoroughly original, but still we can 
point to other such sonnets and other such odes. But 
can any one mention any poem of exactly the same 



138 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

structural and literary type as " Fears and Scruples/' 
as "The Householder/' as "House'' or "Shop," as 
" Nationality in Drinks," as " Sibrandus Schafnabur- 
gensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of 
" Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the " Bad Dreams." 

The thing which ought to be said about Browning 
by those who do not enjoy him is simply that they do 
not like his form ; that they have studied the form, and 
think it a bad form. If more people said things of this 
sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeak- 
ably in clarity and common honesty. Browning put 
himself before the world as a good poet. Let those 
who think he failed call him a bad poet, and there will 
be an end of the matter. There are many styles in 
art which perfectly competent aesthetic judges cannot 
endure. For instance, it would be perfectly Legitimate 
for a strict lover of Gothic to say that one of the 
monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches 
with bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet 
long, was, in his opinion, ugly. But surely it would 
be perfectly ridiculous for any one to say that it had no 
form. A man's actual feelings about it might be better 
expressed by saying that it had too much. To say 
that Browning was merely a thinker because you think 
" Caliban upon Setebos " ugly, is precisely as absurd as 
it would be to call the author of the old Belgian altar- 
Y)iece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. 
The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent 
to technical beauty, but that he invented a particular 
kind of technical beauty to which any one else is free 
to be as indifferent as he chooses. 

There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to 
vague and unmeaning criticism. The usual way of 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 139 

criticising an author, particularly an author who has 
added something to the literary forms of the world, is 
to complain that his work does not contain something 
which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. 
The correct thing to say about Maeterlinck is that 
some play of his in which, let us say, a princess dies in 
a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain beauty, but 
that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that 
really boisterous will to live which may be found in 
Martin Chuzzlewit. The right thing to say about 
Cyrano de Bergerac is that it may have a certain 
kind of wit and spirit, but that it really throws no light 
on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. 
It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three- 
quarters of the blame and criticism commonly directed 
against artists and authors falls under this general 
objection, and is essentially valueless. Authors both 
great and small are like everything else in existence, 
upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed 
for not doing, not only what they have failed to do to 
reach their own ideal, but what they have never tried 
to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we can 
show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and 
loyally pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he 
could have written In Memoriam if he had tried. 

Browning has suffered far more injustice from his 
admirers than from his opponents, for his admirers 
have for the most part got hold of the matter, so to 
speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is 
ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was 
a kind of necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in 
order to express novel and profound ideas. But this 
is an entire mistake. What is called ugliness was to 



140 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

Browning not in tlie least a necessary evil, but a quite 
unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. 
For reasons that we shall see presently in discussing 
the philosophical use of the grotesque, it did so happen 
that Browning's grotesque style was very suitable for 
the expression of his peculiar moral and metaphysical 
view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunder- 
stood if we do not realise first of all that he had a 
love of the grotesque of the nature of art for art's 
sake. Here, for example, is a short distinct poem 
merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs 
in which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served 
to him. This is the whole poem, and a very good poem 
too — 

** Up jumped Tokay on our table, 
Like a pigmy castle-warder, 
Dwarfish to see, but stout and able, 
Arms and accoutrements all in order ; 
And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South 
Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth, 
Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot- feather, 
Twisted his thumb in his red moustache. 
Jingled his huge brass spurs together. 
Tightened his waist with its Buda sash. 
And then, with an impudence nought could abash, 
Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the heholder. 
For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder : 
And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting. 
And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting. 
Went the little man. Sir Ausbruch, strutting 1 " 

I suppose there are Browning students in existence 
who would think that this poem contained something 
pregnant about the Temperance question, or was a 
marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic movement 
in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently 



Ti.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 141 

apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ri- 
diculous knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually 
moulding one of these preposterous German jugs. 
Now before studying the real character of this 
Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be 
recognised about Browning's work. It is this — that 
it is absolutely necessary to remember that Browning 
had, like every other poet, his simple and indisputable 
failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the bad- 
ness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing 
to speak of the badness of his artistic aim. Brown- 
ing's style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many 
examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this point 
there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment 
used by the public towards the poets. It is very little 
realised that the vast majority of great poets have 
written an enormous amount of very bad poetry. The 
unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be 
almost alone in this ; but any one who thinks so can 
scarcely have read a certain number of the minor 
poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson. 

Now it is only just to Browning that his more 
uncouth effusions should not be treated as masterpieces 
by which he must stand or fall, but treated simply as 
his failures. It is really true that such a line as 

'*Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed 
beast?" 

is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite 
equally true that Tennyson's 

**And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of 
peace," 

is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not 



142 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

say that this proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed 
controversialist and metaphysician. They say that it 
is a bad example of Tennyson's form ; they do not say 
that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference to 
form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer 
instances of this failure in his own style than any other 
of the great poets, with the exception of one or two like 
Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a mysterious 
incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all 
original poets, particularly poets who have invented an 
artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit — 
the habit of writing imitations of themselves. Every 
now and then in the works of the noblest classical 
poets you will come upon passages which read like 
extracts from an American book of parodies. Swin- 
burne, for example, when he wrote the couplet — 

*' From the lilies and languors of virtue 
To the raptures and roses of vice," 

wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, 
an imitation which seems indeed to have the wholly 
unjust and uncritical object of proving that the Swin- 
burnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial let- 
ters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote 
the line — 

" Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red- 
maned star," 

was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sym- 
pathetic spirit of American humour. This tendency 
is, of course, the result of self-consciousness and 
theatricality of modern life in which each of us is 
forced to conceive ourselves as part of a dramatis 
perso7ice and act perpetually in character. Browning 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 143 

sometimes yielded to this temptation to be a great 
deal too like himself. 

" Willi widen thee out till thou turnest 
From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace, 
To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest." 

This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning 
any more than in Swinburne. But, on the other hand, 
it is not to be attributed in Swinburne to a momentary 
exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital aesthetic 
deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that 
the question is not whether that particular preposterous 
couplet about lilies and roses redounds to the credit of 
the Swinburnian style, but whether it would be possible 
in any other style than the Swinburnian to have written 
the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the 
essential issue about Browning as an artist is not 
whether he, in common with Byron, Wordsworth, 
Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote 
bad poetry, but whether in any other style except 
Browning's you could have achieved the precise artistic 
effect which is achieved by such incomparable lyrics 
as "The Patriot or "The Laboratory.'' The answer 
must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the 
whole justification of Browning as an artist. 

The question now arises, therefore, what was his 
conception of his functions as an artist ? We have 
already agreed that his artistic originality concerned 
itself chiefly with the serious use of the grotesque. 
It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the 
serious use of the grotesque, and w^hat relation does 
the grotesque bear to the eternal and fundamental 
elements in life? 



144 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

One of the most curious things to notice about 
popular aesthetic criticism is the number of phrases it 
will be found to use which are intended to express an 
aesthetic failure, and which express merely an aesthetic 
variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often 
hear the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, 
'^ The scenery round such and such a place has no 
interest; it is quite flat." To disparage scenery as 
quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite 
white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a 
sublime quality in certain landscapes, just as rockiness 
is a sublime quality in others. In the same way there 
are a great number of phrases commonly used in order 
to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in 
fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the 
most distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics 
says of him, for example, '^ He has never meant to be 
rugged, but has become so in striving after strength/' 
To say that Browning never tried to be rugged is like 
saying that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, 
or that Mr. W. S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. 
The whole issue depends upon whether we realise the 
simple and essential fact that ruggedness is a mode of 
art like gloominess or extravagance. Some poems ought 
to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. 
When we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at 
sunset, we do not say that the cloud is beautiful al- 
though it is ragged at the edges. When we see a gnarled 
and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine although 
it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say 
that it is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we 
say apologetically that it never meant to be rugged, 
but became so in its striving after strength. Now, to 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 145 

say that Browning's poems, artistically considered, are 
fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to 
say that a rock, artistically considered, is fine although 
it is rugged. Ruggedness being an essential quality in 
the universe, there is that in man which responds to it 
as to the striking of any other chord of the eternal 
harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not 
only to the stars and flowers, but also to the toadstools 
and the monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be 
repeated as the essential of the question that on this 
side of our nature we do emphatically love the form 
of the toadstools, and not merely some complicated 
botanical and moral lessons which the philosopher may 
draw from them. For example, just as there is such a 
thing as a poetical metre being beautifully light or 
beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such a thing 
as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In 
the old ballads, for instance, every person of literary 
taste will be struck by a certain attractiveness in the 
bold, varying, irregular verse — 

** He is either himsel' a devil frae hell. 
Or else his mother a witch maun be ; 
I wadna have ridden that wan water 
For a' the gowd in Christentie," 

is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as 

** There's a bower of roses by Bendermeer stream, 
And the nightingale sings in it all the night long,'* 

is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for 
this particular kind of staccato music. The absurd 
notion that he had no sense of melody in verse is only 
possible to people who think that there is no melody in 



146 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give 
a satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality 
would be impossible without quotations more copious 
than entertaining. But the essential point has been 
suggested. 

'' They were purple of raiment and golden, 
Filled full of thee, fiery with wine, 
Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden, 
In marvellous chambers of thine," 

is beautiful language^ but not the only sort of beautiful 
language. This, for instance, has also a tune in it — 

* ' I — * next poet. ' No, my hearties, 
I nor am, nor fain would be ! 
Choose your chiefs and pick your parties. 
Not one soul revolt to me ! 

Which of you did I enable 
Once to slip inside my breast, 
There to catalogue and label 
What I like least, what love best, 
Hope and fear, believe and doubt of, 
Seek and shun, respect, deride. 
Who has right to make a rout of 
Rarities he found inside ? " 

This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its 
own kind of music, and the man who cannot feel it can 
never have enjoyed the sound of soldiers marching by. 
This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember about 
Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical 
method — that the question is not whether that method 
is the best in the world, but the question whether there 
are not certain things which can only be conveyed by 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 147 

that method. It is perfectly true, for instance, that a 
really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as — 

" Thou wert the highest, yet most human too,'' 

and 

** We needs must love the highest when we see it," 

would really be made the worse for being translated 
into Browning. It would probably become 

*' High's human ; man loves best, best visible," 

and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and 
courtly plainness. But it is quite equally true that any 
really characteristic fragment of Browning, if it were 
only the tempestuous scolding of the organist in 
" Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha " — 

** Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there ! 

Down it dips, gone like a rocket. 
What, you want, do you, to come unawares. 
Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers, 
And find a poor devil has ended his cares 
At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs ? 

Do I carry the moon in my pocket ? " 

— it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of 
rhymes ending with a frantic astronomical image would 
lose in energy and spirit if it were written in a con- 
ventional and classical style, and ran — 

** What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find 
Disjected bones adrift upon the stair 
Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I 
Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun ? " 

Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be 
excellent poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad 



148 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

exactly in so far as it was good ; that it would lose all 
the swing, the rush, the energy of the preposterous and 
grotesque original ? In fact, we may see how un- 
manageable is this classical treatment of the essentially 
absurd in Tennyson himself. The humorous passages 
in The Princess, though often really humorous in them- 
selves, always appear forced and feeble because they 
have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and 
the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with hu- 
mour. If Browning had written the passage which 
opens Tlie Princess, descriptive of the " larking " of the 
villagers in the magnate's park, he would have spared 
us nothing; he would not have spared us the shrill un- 
educated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger 
beer. He would have crammed the poem with uncouth 
similes ; he would have changed the metre a hundred 
times ; he would have broken into doggerel and into 
rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said 
and done, as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the 
grumbling organist, the impression of a certain eternal 
human energy. Energy and joy, the father and the 
mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. 
We should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but 
the sensation of which Mr. Henley writes — 

'' Praise the generous gods for giving, 
In this world of sin and strife, 
With some little time for living. 
Unto each the joy of life,'* 

the thought that every wise man has when looking at 
a Bank Holiday crowd at Margate. 

To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and 
fantastic style most would be to go very deep into his 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 149 

spirit indeed, probably a great deal deeper than it is 
possible to go. But it is worth while to suggest ten- 
tatively the general function of the grotesque in art 
generally and in his art in particular. There is one 
very curious idea into which we have been hypnotised 
by the more eloquent poets, and that is that nature in 
the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is 
a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms 
are commonly understood. The whole world of the 
fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and non- 
sensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, 
German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, bur- 
lesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and 
the puns of Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and 
a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies 
in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of 
caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too 
often as consisting of stars and lilies ; but these are 
not poets who live in the country ; they are men who 
go to the country for inspiration and could no more 
live in the country than they could go to bed in 
Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of 
nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means 
cows and pigs, and creatures more humorous than can 
be found in a whole sketch-book of Callot. And the 
element of the grotesque in art, like the element of 
the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, 
the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own 
way. Browning's verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is 
not complex or artificial ; it is natural and in the 
legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like 
the trees, dances like the dust ; it is ragged like the 
thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy, like the toadstool. 



150 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

Energy which disregards the standard of classical art 
is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the 
uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell 
on the oddity of a fungus or a jellyfish makes him 
dwell on the oddity of a philosophical idea. Here, for 
example, we have a random instance from ^' The Eng- 
lishman in Italy '^ of the way in which Browning, when 
he was most Browning, regarded physical nature. 

'' And pitch down his basket before us, 

All trembling alive 
With pink and gray jellies, your sea-fruit ; 

You touch the strange lumps, 
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner 

Of horns and of humps. 
Which only the fisher looks grave at.'' 

Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass 
to Walt Whitman, but to Browning it really meant 
such things as these, the monstrosities and living 
mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things 
meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so 
strange thoughts and strange images meant to him 
energy in the mental world. When, in one of his later 
poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a supreme 
moment of sincerity to explain that small things may 
be filled with God as well as great, he uses the very 
same kind of image, the image of a shapeless sea-beast, 
to embody that noble conception. 

** The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, 
The simplest of creations, just a sac 
That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives 
And feels, and could do neither, we conclude. 
If simplified still further one degree." 

(Sludge.) 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 151 

These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the 
first thing on which the eye of the poet lights in 
looking on a landscape, and the last in the significance 
of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the 
Everlasting. 

There is another and but slightly different use of the 
grotesque, but which is definitely valuable in Brown- 
ing's poetry, and indeed in all poetry. To present a 
matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to 
touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention 
to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object 
itself. It is difficult to give examples of the proper 
use of grotesqueness without becoming too grotesque. 
But we should all agree that if St. PauFs Cathedral 
were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, 
for the moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it 
more than we have done all the centuries during which 
it has rested on its foundations. Now it is the supreme 
function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make 
the world stand on its head that people may look at it. 
If we say " a man is a man ^^ we awaken no sense of 
the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, 
in the language of the old satirist, " that man is a two- 
legged bird, without feathers/' the phrase does, for a 
moment, make us look at man from the outside and 
give us a thrill in his presence. When the author of 
the Book of Job insists upon the huge, half-witted, 
apparently unmeaning magnificence andmight of Behe- 
moth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to 
this sense of wonder provoked by the grotesque. 
" Canst thou play with him as with a bird, canst thou 
bind him for thy maidens ? " he says in an admirable 
passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a house- 



152 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

hold pet is curiously in the spirit of the humour of 
Browning. 

But when it is clearly understood that Browning's 
love of the fantastic in style was a perfectly serious 
artistic love, when we understand that he enjoyed 
working in that style, as a Chinese potter might enjoy 
making dragons, or a mediaeval mason making devils, 
there yet remains something definite which must be laid 
to his account as a fault. He certainly had a capacity 
for becoming perfectly childish in his indulgence in 
ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at all, 
such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures 
that only just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. 
Probably it was only one of the marks of his singular 
vitality, curiosity, and interest in details. He was 
certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are 
fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. 
He prided himself on having written The Ring and 
the Bookj and he also prided himself on knowing 
good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on 
re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it 
is to be presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to 
imagine, that he prided himself on such rhymes as the 
following in Pacchiarotto : — 

" The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey 
By piping advice in one key — 
That his pipe should play a prelude 
To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued, 
Something not harsh but docile, 
Man-liquid, not man-fossil." 

This writing, considered as writing, can only 
be regarded as a kind of joke, and most probably 
Browning considered it so himself. It has nothing at 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 153 

all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the 
grotesque which may be found in such admirable 
passages as this from " Holy Cross Day '' : — 

** Give your first groan — compunction's at work ; 
And soft ! from a Jew you mount to a Turk. 
Lo ! Micah — the self-same beard on chin, 
He was four times already converted in ! '' 

This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it 
passion and philosophy are as well expressed as through 
any other medium. But the rhyming frenzy of Brown- 
ing has no particular relation even to the poems in 
which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure ; 
it can only be called the horse-play of literature. It 
may be noted, for example, as a rather curious fact 
that the ingenious rhymes are generally only mathe- 
matical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of asso- 
nance. " The Pied Piper of Hamelin,^^ a poem written 
for children, and bound in general to be lucid and 
readable, ends with a rhyme which it is physically 
impossible for any one to say : — 

** And, whether they pipe us free, fr6m rats or fr<5m mice, 
If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise." 

This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a 
kind of demented ingenuity even out of poems in 
which it was quite inappropriate, is a thing which 
must be recognised, and recognised all the more 
because as a whole he was a very perfect artist, and 
a particularly perfect artist in the use of the grotesque. 
But everywhere when we go a little below the surface 
in Browning we find that there was something in him 
perverse and unusual despite all his working normality 



154 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

and simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, 
but it was not made exactly like the ordinary mind. 
It was like a piece of strong wood with a knot in it. 

The quality of what can only be called buffoonery 
which is under discussion is indeed one of the many 
things in which Browning was more of an Elizabethan 
than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in 
their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and 
over-loaded language, above all in their feeling for 
learning as an enjoyment and almost a frivolity. But 
there was nothing in which he was so thoroughly 
Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, 
that when he felt inclined to write a page of quite 
uninteresting nonsense, he immediately did so. Many 
great writers have contrived to be tedious, and ap- 
parently aimless, while expounding some thought 
which they believed to be grave and profitable ; but 
this frivolous stupidity had not been found in any 
great writer since the time of Kabelais and the time 
of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes 
of Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine 
ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through 
three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists and in 
Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark 
of a real hilarity. People must be very happy to be 
so easily amused. 

In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, 
the question is somewhat more difficult to handle. 
Many people have supposed Browning to be profound 
because he was obscure, and many other people, 
hardly less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure 
because he was profound. He was frequently pro- 
found, he was occasionally obscure, but as a matter 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 155 

of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each 
other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, 
like his love of the grotesque, was simply a charac- 
teristic of his, a trick of his temperament, and had 
little or nothing to do with whether what he was 
expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for 
example, that a person well read in English poetry 
but unacquainted with Browning's style were earnestly 
invited to consider the following verse : — 

** Hobbs hints blue — straight he turtle eats. 
Nobbs prints blue — claret crowns his cup. 
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats — 

Both gorge. Who fished the murex up ? 
What porridge had John Keats ? " 

The individual so confronted would say without hesi- 
tation that it must indeed be an abstruse and inde- 
scribable thought which could only be conveyed- by 
remarks so completely disconnected. But the point 
of the matter is that the thought contained in this 
amazing verse is not abstruse or philosophical at all, 
but is a perfectly ordinary and straightforward com- 
ment, which any one might have made upon an obvious 
fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to 
explain itself, if we know the meaning of the word 
" murex," which is the name of a sea-shell, out of 
which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. 
The poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new 
fashion in literature, and points out that Hobbs, 
Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by merely using 
the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly 
natural comment : — 

'' . . . Who fished the murex up ? 
What porridge had John Keats ? " 



166 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to 
be subtle, but is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment 
at the end of a light poem. Browning is not obscure 
because he has such deep things to say, any more than 
he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. 
He is both of these things primarily, because he likes 
to express himself in a particular manner. The man- 
ner is as natural to him as a man's physical voice, and 
it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. Here 
comes in the fundamental difference between Browning 
and such a writer as George Meredith, with whom the 
Philistine satirist would so often in the matter of 
complexity class him. The works of George Meredith 
are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they 
mean. They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive 
sensations, subconscious certainties and uncertainties, 
and it really requires a somewhat curious and un- 
familiar mode of speech to indicate the presence of 
these. But the great part of Browning's actual senti- 
ments, and almost all the finest and most literary of 
them, are perfectly plain and popular and eternal 
sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing 
strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because 
of the delicate rhythm of the song he sings. Browning 
is simply a great demagogue, with an impediment in 
his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly. Brown- 
ing is a man whose excitement for the glory of the 
obvious is so great that his speech becomes disjointed 
and precipitate: he becomes eccentric through his 
advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the love 
of sanity. 

If Browning and George Meredith were each 
describing the same act, they might both be obscure, 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 157 

but their obscurities would be entirely different. 
Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so 
prosaic and material an act as a man being knocked 
downstairs by another man to whom he had given the 
lie, Meredith's description would refer to something 
which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least 
could not describe. It might be a sudden sense of 
anarchy in the brain of the assaulter, or a stupefaction 
and stunned serenity in that of the object of the 
assault. He might write, " Wain wood's * Men vary in 
veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt 
the doors of his brain burst, and Wainwood a swift 
rushing of himself through air accompanied with a 
clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other 
words, would speak queerly because he was describing 
queer mental experiences. But Browning might sim- 
ply be describing the material incident of the man 
being knocked downstairs, and his description would 
run: — 

'' What then ? * You lie ' and doormat below stairs 
Takes bump from back." 

This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane 
swiftness. Browning is not like Meredith, anxious to 
pause and examine the sensations of the combatants, 
nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He 
is only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the 
stairs quickly that he leaves out about half the story. 

Many, who could understand that ruggedness might 
be an artistic quality, would decisively, and in most 
cases rightly, deny that obscurity could under any 
conceivable circumstances be an artistic quality. But 
here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more 
cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain 



158 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which 
arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as 
to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the 
end. It is well sometimes to half understand a poem 
in the same manner that we half understand the world. 
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods, 
is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in 
a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the 
feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered 
something stupendously direct and important, and 
that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or 
understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and 
that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the 
full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in 
wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. 

But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all 
the strange and unclassified artistic merits of Brown- 
ing. He was always trying experiments ; sometimes 
he failed, producing clumsy and irritating metres, top- 
heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often 
he triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed 
poems, every one of which taken separately might 
have founded an artistic school. But whether suc- 
cessful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce 
hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a con- 
servative. The last book he published in his lifetime, 
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their 
Day, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than 
Paracelsus. This is the true light in which to regard 
Browning as an artist. He had determined to leave 
no spot of the cosmos unadorned by his poetry which 
he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable 
example can be found in that splendid poem " Childe 



VI.] BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 159 

Koland to the Dark Tower Came." It is the hint of 
an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry 
of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. 
Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional 
gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of 
celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy land- 
scapes, but Browning is not content with this. He 
insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. 
That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man un- 
shaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm 
and primeval gusto before. 

** If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk 

Above its mates, the head was chopped ; the bents 
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents 
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk 
All hope of greenness ? 'tis a brute must walk 
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents." 

This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment 
which comes upon us, not so often among mountains 
and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common 
at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. 
It is the song of the beauty of refuse ; and Browning 
was the first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been 
one of the poems about which most of those pedantic 
and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked 
invariably by those who treat Browning as a science 
instead of a poet, ^^What does the poem of Childe 
Roland mean ? " The only genuine answer to this 
is, " What does anything mean ? '' Does the earth 
mean nothing ? Do grey skies and wastes covered 
with thistles mean nothing ? Does an old horse 
turned out to graze mean nothing ? If it does, there 
is but one further truth to be added — that everything 
means nothing. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE niNG AND THE BOOK 

When we have once realised the great conception of 
the plan of The Ring and the JSooZc, the studying of a 
single matter from nine different standpoints, it be- 
comes exceedingly interesting to notice what these 
standpoints are ; what figures Browning has selected 
as voicing the essential and distinct versions of the 
case. One of the ablest and most sympathetic of all 
the critics of Browning, Mr. Augustine Birrell, has 
said in one place that the speeches of the two advocates 
in The Ring and the Book will scarcely be very inter- 
esting to the ordinary reader. However that may be, 
there can be little doubt that a great number of the 
readers of Browning think them beside the mark and 
adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say 
that anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. 
We are apt to go on thinking so until some mere trifle 
puts the matter in a new light, and the detail that 
seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central 
pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues 
of his poem, Browning is endeavouring to depict the 
various strange ways in which a fact gets itself pre- 
sented to the world. In every question there are 
partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments 
for the right side ; there are also partisans who bring 

160 



CHAP. VII.] THE BING AND THE BOOK 161 

cogent and convincing arguments for the wrong side. 
But over and above these, there does exist in every 
great controversy a class of more or less official 
partisans who are continually engaged in defending 
each cause by entirely inappropriate arguments. They 
do not know the real good that can be said for the 
good cause, nor the real good that can be said for 
the bad one. They are represented by the animated, 
learned, eloquent, ingenious, and entirely futile and 
impertinent arguments of Juris Doctor Bottinius and> 
Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men ^ 
brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, 
but their own cause. The introduction of them is one 
of the finest and most artistic strokes in Tlie Ring and 
the Book, 

We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary 
parallel. Suppose that a poet of the type of Browning 
lived some centuries hence and found in some cause 
cel^bre of our day, such as the Parnell Commission, an 
opportunity for a work similar in its design to The 
Bing and the Book. The first monologue, which would 
be called ^^ Half -London,'' would be the arguments of an 
ordinary educated and sensible Unionist who believed 
that there really was evidence that the Nationalist 
movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public 
panic. The " Other half -London " would be the utter- 
ance of an ordinary educated and sensible Home Kuler, 
who thought that in the main Nationalism was one dis- 
tinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poison- 
ous and stagnant problem. The " Tertium Quid " would 
be some detached intellectual, committed neither to 
Nationalism nor to Unionism, possibly Mr. Bernard 
Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning 



162 ROBERT BROWNING [cdap. 

monologue. Then of course would come the speeches 
of the great actors in the drama, the icy anger of 
Parnell, the shuffling apologies of Pigott. But we 
should feel that the record was incomplete without 
another touch which in practice has so much to do 
with the confusion of such a question. Bottinius and 
Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two cynical profes- 
sional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and 
incredible theories of the case, would be represented 
by two party journalists ; one of whom was ready to base 
his case either on the fact that Parnell was a Socialist 
or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Eoman Catholic ; 
and the other of whom was ready to base his case on 
the theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was 
in league with him, or had never heard of him, or any- 
thing else that was remote from the world of real- 
ity. These are the kind of little touches for which 
we must always be on the look-out in Browning. 
Even if a digression, or a simile, or a whole scene in 
a play, seems to have no point or value, let us wait a 
little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote 
anything that did not mean a great deal. 

It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, pos- 
sessing no little cultivation and fertility, will, in speak- 
ing of a work of art, let fall almost accidentally some 
apparently trivial comment, which reveals to us with 
an instantaneous and complete mental illumination 
the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is 
concerned, in the smallest degree understand what he 
is talking about. He may have intended to correct 
merely some minute detail of the work he is studying, 
but that single movement is enough to blow him and 
all his diplomas into the air. These are the sensa- 



VII.] THE BING AND THE BOOK 163 

tions with which the true Browningite will regard the 
criticism made by so many of Browning's critics and 
biographers about Tlie Eing and the Book, That 
criticism was embodied by one of them in the words 
'' the theme looked at dispassionately is unworthy of 
the monument in which it is entombed for eternity.'^ 
Now this remark shows at once that the critic does 
not know what The Ring and the Book means. We 
feel about it as we should feel about a man who said 
that the plot of Tristram Shandy was not well con- 
structed, or that the women in Eossetti's pictures did 
not look useful and industrious. A man who has 
missed the fact that Tristram Shandy is a game of 
digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical 
joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not 
read Tristram Shandy at all. The man who objects 
to the Eossetti pictures because they depict a sad and 
sensuous day-dream, objects to their existing at all. 
And any one who objects to Browning writing his huge 
epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in 
reality missed the whole length and breadth of the 
poet's meaning. The essence of The Ring and the 
Book is that it is the great epic of the nineteenth 
century, because it is the great epic of the enormous 
importance of small things. The supreme difference 
that divides The Ring and the Book from all the great 
poems of similar length and largeness of design is 
precisely the fact that all these are about affairs 
commonly called important, and The Ring and the 
Book is about an affair commonly called contemptible. 
Homer says, '' I will show you the relations between 
man and heaven as exhibited in a great legend of love 
and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all 



164 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal 
women." The author of the Book of Job says, ^^I 
will show you the relations between man and heaven 
by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God 
out of a whirlwind." Virgil says, ^^ I will show you 
the relations of man to heaven by the tale of the 
origin of the greatest people and the founding of 
the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, 
^^ I will show you the relations of man to heaven by 
uncovering the very machinery of the spiritual uni- 
verse, and letting you hear as I have heard, the roar- 
ing of the mills of God." Milton says, ^' I will show 
you the relations of man to heaven by telling you of 
the very beginning of all things, and the first shaping 
of the thing that is evil in the first twilight of time." 
Browning says, ^^ I will show you the relations of man 
to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian 
book of criminal trials from w*hich I select one of 
the meanest and most completely forgotten." Until 
we have realised this fundamental idea in The Ring 
and the Book all criticism is misleading. 

In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodi- 
ment of his time. The characteristics of the modern 
movements par excellence is the apotheosis of the insig- 
nificant. Whether it be the school of poetry which 
sees more in one cowslip or clover top than in forests 
and waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds 
something indescribably significant in the pattern 
of a hearth-rug, or the tint of a man's tweed coat,, 
the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken still 
and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light 
shining out of a window at night ; Zola filling note- 
books with the medical significance of the twitching 



VII.] THE BING AND THE BOOK 165 

of a man's toes, or the loss of his appetite; Whitman 
counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of 
the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over 
the third-class ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; 
George Meredith seeing a soul's tragedy in a phrase 
at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling three 
pages with stage directions to describe a parlour ; all 
these men, different in every other particular, are 
alike in this, that they have ceased to believe cer- 
tain things to be important and the rest to be un- 
important. Significance is to them a wild thing 
that may leap upon them from any hiding-place. 
They have all become terribly impressed with, and 
a little bit alarmed at, the mysterious powers of 
small things. Their difference from the old epic 
poets is the whole difference between an age that 
fought with dragons and an age that fights with 
microbes. 

This tide of the importance of small things is flow- 
ing so steadily around us upon every side to-day, 
that we do not sufficiently realise that if there was 
one man in English literary history who might with 
justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was 
Eobert Browning. When Browning arose, literature 
was entirely in the hands of the Tennysonian poet. 
The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention trivialities, 
but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivi- 
ally ; Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes 
to speak sensationally. Now this sense of the terrible 
importance of detail was a sense which may be said to 
have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of 
a demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one 
feeling might have driven him to a condition not far 



166 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

from madness. Any room that he was sitting in 
glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths 
gaping with a story. There was sometimes no back- 
ground and no middle distance in his mind. A human 
face and the pattern on the wall behind it came for- 
ward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be 
repeated, that if ever he who had the strongest head 
in the world had gone mad, it would have been 
through this turbulent democracy of things. If he 
looked at a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, 
or a puppy at play, each began to be bewitched with 
the spell of a kind of fairyland of philosophers : the 
vase, like the jar in the Arabian Nights, to send up a 
smoke of thoughts and shapes ; the hat to produce 
souls, as a conjurer's hat produces rabbits ; the cabbage 
to swell and overshadow the earth, like the Tree of 
Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a scamper 
along the road to the end of the world. Any one who 
has read Browning's longer poems knows how con- 
stantly a simile or figure of speech is selected, not 
among the large, well-recognised figures common in 
poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and 
how often it is characterised by smallness and a certain 
quaint exactitude which could not have been found 
in any more usual example. Thus, for instance. 
Prince Holienstiel-ScUioangau explains the psycho- 
logical meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous 
activities by comparing them to the impulse which 
has just led him, even in the act of talking, to draw 
a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to 
connect two separate blots that were already there. 
This queer example is selected as the best possible 
instance of a certain fundamental restlessness and 



VII.] THE BING AND THE BOOK 167 

desire to add a toucli to things in the spirit of man. 
I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of 
the idea after doing the thing himself, and sat in 
a philosophical trance staring at a piece of inked 
blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and 
in that insignificant act, some immemorial monster 
of the mind, nameless from the beginning of the world, 
had risen to the surface of the spiritual sea. 

It is therefore the very essence of Browning's 
genius, and the very essence of The Ring and the Book, 
that it should be the enormous multiplication of a 
small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism to 
complain that the story is a current and sordid story, 
for the whole object of the poem is to show what 
infinities of spiritual good and evil a current and 
sordid story may contain. When once this is realised, 
it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about 
the work. It explains, for example. Browning's de- 
tailed and picturesque account of the glorious dust-bin 
of odds and ends for sale, out of which he picked the 
printed record of the trial, and his insistence on its 
cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its 
crabbed Latin. The more soiled and dark and in- 
significant he can make the text appear, the better for 
his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains again the 
strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts 
of the forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game 
of seeing how much was really involved in one paltry 
fragment of fact. To have introduced large quantities 
of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. The 
Ring and the Book therefore, to re-capitulate the view 
arrived at so far, is the typical epic of our age, because 
it expresses the richness of life by taking as a text 



168 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

a poor story. It pays to existence the highest of all 
possible compliments — the great compliment which 
monarchy paid to mankind — the compliment of select- 
ing from it almost at random. 

But this is only the first half of the claim of Tlie 
Ring and the Book to be the typical epic of modern 
times. The second half of that claim, the second 
respect in which the work is representative of all 
modern development, requires somewhat more careful 
statement. The Ring and the Book is of course, essen- 
tially speaking, a detective story. Its difference from 
the ordinary detective story is that it seeks to estab- 
lish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre of 
spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of 
exciting quality that a detective story has, and a very 
excellent quality it is. But the element which is 
important, and which now requires pointing out, is 
the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt 
and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is 
discovered. In order to make clear the peculiar char- 
acter of this method, it is necessary to begin rather 
nearer the beginning, and to go back some little way 
in literary history. 

I do not know whether anybody, including the 
editor himself, has ever noticed a peculiar coincidence 
which may be found in the arrangement of the lyrics 
in Sir Francis Palgrave's Golden Treasury, However 
that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well 
known, are placed side by side, and their juxtaposition 
represents one vast revolution in the poetical manner 
of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's almost 
too well known 



VII.] THE BING AND THE BOOK 169 

'* When lovely woman stoops to folly, 
And finds too late that men betray, 
What charm can soothe her melancholy ? 
What art can wash her guilt away ? " 

Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and 
thrilling change of note, the voice of Burns : — 

** Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, 
How can ye bloom sae fair ? 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 
And I sae f u' of care ? 

*' Thou' 11 break my heart, thou bonny bird, 
That sings upon the bough, 
Thou minds me of the happy days 
When my fause Love was true." 

A man might read those two poems a great many- 
times without happening to realise that they are two 
poems on exactly the same subject — the subject of 
a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole 
difference — the difference struck by the very first note 
of the voice of any one who reads them — is this funda- 
mental difference that Goldsmith's words are spoken 
about a certain situation, and Burns' words are spoken 
in that situation. 

In the transition from one of these lyrics to the 
other, we have a vital change in the conception of the 
functions of the poet ; a change of which Burns was in 
many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a 
manner that we shall see presently, was the culmina- 
tion. 

Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradi- 
tion of the old historic idea of what a poet was. The 
poet, the vates, was the supreme and absolute critic of 
human existence, the chorus in the human drama j he 



170 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

was, to employ two words, which when analysed are 
the same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took 
a situation, such as the situation of a woman deserted 
by a man before-mentioned, and he gave, as Goldsmith 
gives, his own personal and definite decision upon it, 
entirely based upon general principles, and entirely 
from the outside. Then, as in the case of The Golden 
Treasury, he has no sooner given judgment than there 
comes a bitter and confounding cry out of the very 
heart of the situation itself, which tells us things 
which would have been quite left out of account by the 
poet of the general rule. No one, for example, but a 
person who knew something of the inside of agony 
would have introduced that touch of the rage of the 
mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, 
" Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird.^^ We find 
and could find no such touch in Goldsmith. We have 
to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the votes or 
poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown 
by this new method of what may be called the songs 
of experience. 

Now Browning, as he appears in The Ring and the 
Booky represents the attempt to discover, not the truth 
in the sense that Goldsmith states it, but the larger 
truth which is made up of all the emotional experi- 
ences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, 
like Goldsmith, seeks ultimately to be just and 
impartial, but he does it by endeavouring to feel 
acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith stands 
apart from all the passions of the case, and Brown- 
ing includes them all. If Browning were endeavouring 
to do strict justice in a case like that of the deserted 
lady by the banks of Doon, he would not touch or 



VII.] THE BING AND THE BOOK 171 

modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns 
sang it, but he would write other songs, perhaps 
equally pathetic. A lyric or a soliloquy would con- 
vince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its language, 
that there was some pathos in the other actors in the 
drama ; some pathos, for example, in a weak man, con- 
scious that in a passionate ignorance of life he had 
thrown away his power of love, lacking the moral 
courage to throw his prospects after it. We should 
be reminded again that there was some pathos in the 
position, let us say, of the seducer's mother, who had 
built all her hopes upon developments which a mesal- 
liance would overthrow, or in the position of some rival 
lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which 
he had not even the miserable comfort of a locus standi. 
All these characters in the story, Browning would 
realise from their own emotional point of view before 
he gave judgment. The poet in his ancient office held 
a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave men 
halters and halos ; Browning gives men neither halter 
nor halo, he gives them voices. This is indeed the 
most bountiful of all the functions of the poet, that he 
gives men words, for which men from the beginning of 
the world have starved more than for bread. 

Here then we have the second great respect in which 
The Ring and the Book is the great epic of the age. It 
is the great epic of the age, because it is the expression 
of the belief, it might almost be said of the discovery, 
that no man ever lived upon this earth without 
possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who 
had not a little more to say for himself than any 
formal system of justice was likely to say for him. It 
is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the 



172 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

application of this principle would revolutionise the 
old heroic epic, in which the poet decided absolutely 
the moral relations and moral value of the characters. 
Suppose, for example, that Homer had written the 
Odyssey on the principle of The Ring and the Book^ how 
disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to 
read the story from the point of view of Antinous ! 
Without contradicting a single material fact, without 
telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so 
change the whole world around us, that we should 
scarcely know we were dealing with the same place 
and people. The calm face of Penelope would, it may 
be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face 
changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a 
fickle and selfish woman, passing falsely as a widow, 
and playing a double game between the attentions of 
foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful 
appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing 
sailor-husband ; a man prepared to act that most well- 
worn of melodramatic roles, the conjugal bully and 
blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an 
instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, 
if we had the story of the fall of King Arthur told 
from the standpoint of Mordred, it would only be a 
matter of a word or two ; in a turn, in the twinkling of 
an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the 
efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the 
profligacies of high-placed paladins like Lancelot and 
Tristram, and ultimately discovering, with deep regret 
but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to 
frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and 
priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, 
and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes which 



VII.] THE MING AKD THE BOOK 173 

bred these moral evils. It might be that in spite of 
this new view of the case, it would ultimately appear 
that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really 
right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear 
that Pompilia was really right. But any one can see 
the enormous difference in scope and difficulty be- 
tween the old epic which told the whole story from 
one man's point of view, and the new epic which can- 
not come to its conclusion, until it has digested and 
assimilated views as paradoxical and disturbing as 
our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of 
Mordred. 

One of the most important steps ever taken in the 
history of the world is this step, with all its various 
aspects, literary, political, and social, which is repre- 
sented by The Ring and the Book, It is the step of 
deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and dis- 
advantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the 
old epic is the poet who had learnt to speak ; Browning 
in the new epic is the poet who has learnt to listen. 
This listening to truth and error, to heretics, to fools, 
to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere 
chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the 
hardest lesson that humanity has ever been set to 
learn. The Ring and the Book is the embodiment of 
this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the 
epic of free speech. 

Free speech is an idea which has at present all the 
unpopularity of a truism ; so that we tend to forget 
that it was not so very long ago that it had the more 
practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. 
Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins 
of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, 



174 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted. 
He considers the calm of a city street a thing as 
inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas 
it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and 
effort similar to that which keeps up a battle or a 
fencing match. Just as we forget where we stand 
in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in 
relation to social phenomena. We forget that the 
earth is a star, and we forget that free speech is a 
paradox. 

It is not by any means self-evident upon the face 
of it that an insitution like the liberty of speech is 
right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a 
man utter follies and abominations which you believe 
to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural 
or obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public 
road, or infect half a town with typhoid fever. The 
theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger 
and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, 
that it is very much better at all costs to hear every 
one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified 
upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a 
very daring and even a very surprising theory. It 
is really one of the great discoveries of the modern 
time, but once admitted it is a principle that does not 
merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and 
finally poetry. 

Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply 
the principle to poetry. He perceived that if we wish 
to tell the truth about a human drama, we must not 
tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the villain 
is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that 
the truth had not been told until he had seen in the 



VII.] THE Bma AND THE BOOK 175 

villain the pure and disinterested gentleman that most 
villains firmly believe themselves to be, or until he 
had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the 
custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this 
Browning is beyond all question the founder of the 
most modern school of poetry. Everything that was 
profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable in the 
aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its 
ultimate source in Browning's great conception that 
every one's point of view is interesting, even if it 
be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of view. He 
is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is 
emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically credit- 
able to know something of the grounds of the happi- 
ness of a thoroughly bad man. Since his time we have 
indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the moods of 
the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of 
stolen goods. But Browning, united with the decadents 
on this point, of the value of every human testimony, 
is divided from them sharply and by a chasm in 
another equally important point. He held that it 
is necessary to listen to all sides of a question in order 
to discover the truth of it. But he held that there 
was a truth to discover. He held that justice was a 
mystery, but, not like the decadents, that justice was 
a delusion. He held, in other words, the true 
Browning doctrine, that in a dispute every one was to 
a certain extent right ; not the decadent doctrine that 
in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by 
the nature of things wrong. 

Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly 
be better expressed than in the old and pregnant fable 
about the five blind men who went to visit an elephant. 



176 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. vii. 

One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that an 
elephant was a kind of serpent ; another embraced its 
leg, and was ready to die for the belief that an elephant 
was a kind of tree. In the same way to the man who 
leaned against its side it was a wall; to the man who 
had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran 
upon its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear 
This, as I have said, is the whole theology and philoso- 
phy of Browning. But he differs from the psycho- 
logical decadents and impressionists in this important 
point, that he thinks that although the blind men 
found out very little about the elephant, the elephant 
was an elephant, and was there all the time. The 
blind men formed mistaken theories because an ele- 
phant is a thing with a very curious shape. And 
Browning firmly believed that the Universe was a 
thing with a very curious shape indeed. No blind 
poet could even imagine an elephant without experi- 
ence, and no man, however great and wise, could dream 
of God and not die. But there is a vital distinction 
between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind 
men are misled because there is so much for them to 
learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view 
of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled 
because there was nothing for them to learn. To the 
impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men 
groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a 
serpent. We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, 
and dreaming of trees and serpents without reason 
and without result. 



CHAPTEE VIII 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 

The great fault of most of the appreciation of 
Browning lies in the fact that it conceives the moral 
and artistic value of his work to lie in what is called 
^Hhe message of Browning/' or ^^the teaching of 
Browning/' or, in other words, in the mere opinions 
of Browning. Now Browning had opinions, just as 
he had a dress-suit or a vote for Parliament. He did 
not hesitate to express these opinions any more than 
he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open 
an umbrella, if he had possessed those articles, and 
realised their value. Por example, he had, as his stu- 
dents and eulogists have constantly stated, certain 
definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, 
or the intellectual basis of Christianity. Those 
opinions were very striking and very solid, as every- 
thing was which came out of Browning's mind. His 
two great theories of the universe may be expressed 
in two comparatively parallel phrases. The first 
was what may be called the hope which lies in the 
imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of 
"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly 
and beautifully the idea that some hope may always 
be based on deficiency itself ; in other words, that in 
so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, 
N 177 



178 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

^ there is something about his appearance which indi- 
[ cates that he should have another leg and another 
I eye. The poem suggests admirably that such a sense 
of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon 
a sense of completeness, that the part may easily 
and obviously be greater than the whole. And from 
this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in draw- 
ing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger 
scale of life. For nothing is more certain than 
that though this world is the only world that we 
have known, or of which we could even dream, the 
fact does remain that we have named it " a strange 
world.^^ In other words, we have certainly felt that 
this world did not explain itself, that something in 
its complete and patent picture has been omitted. 
And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos 
where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies 
immortality. This then was the first of the doctrines 
or opinions of Browning, the hope that lies in the 
imperfection of man. The second of the great Brown- 
ing doctrines requires some audacity to express. It 
can only be properly stated as the hope that lies 
in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that 
Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they 
were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. 
He held that these stubborn sorrows and obscure 
valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, 
have provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has 
self-sacrifice and God has none, then man has in the 
Universe a secret and blasphemous superiority. And 
this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning 
reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator 
had not been crucified He would not have been as 



Tin.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 179 

great as thousands of wretched fanatics among His 
own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this 
point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly 
expressed need only be referred to " Saul." But these 
are emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions 
of Browning which I have ventured to characterise 
roughly as the hope in the imperfection of man, and 
more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of God. 
They are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great 
man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on 
behalf of faith which the human spirit will never 
answer or exhaust. But about them in connection 
with Browning there nevertheless remains something 
to be added. 

Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his 
opponents say, an optimist. His theory, that man's 
sense of his own imperfection implies a design of 
perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. 
His theory that man's knowledge of and desire for 
self-sacrifice implies God's knowledge of and desire 
for self-sacrifice is another very good argument for 
optimism. But any one will make the deepest and 
blackest and most incurable mistake about Browning 
who imagines that his optimism was founded on 
any arguments for optimism. Because he had a 
strong intellect, because he had a strong power of 
conviction, he conceived and developed and asserted 
these doctrines of the incompleteness of Man and the 
sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these doctrines were 
the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its 
origin. It is surely obvious that no one can be ar- 
gued into optimism since no one can be argued into 
happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded on 



180 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

opinions wMcli were the work of Browning, but on 
life which was the work of God. One of Browning's 
most celebrated biographers has said, that something 
of Browning's theology must be put down to his 
possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of 
course, like all remarks touching the tragic subject 
of digestion, intended to be funny and to convey some 
kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of 
Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with 
somewhat greater care we shall see that it is indeed 
a thorough compliment to that faith. Nobody, strictly 
speaking, is happier on account of his digestion. 
He is happy because he is so constituted as to for- 
get all about it. Nobody really is convulsed with 
delight at the thought of the ingenious machinery 
which he possesses inside him; the thing which 
delights him is simply the full possession of his 
own human body. I cannot in the least understand 
why a good digestion — that is a good body — should 
not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or 
the first flower of spring. But there is about digestion 
this peculiarity throwing a great light on human 
pessimism, that it is one of the many things which 
we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. 
We should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as 
suffering from his boots if we meant that he had really 
no boots. But we do speak of a man suffering from 
digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack 
of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man 
suffering from nerves when we mean that his nerves 
are more inefficient than any one else's nerves. If 
any one wishes to see how grossly language can 
degenerate, he need only compare the old optimistic 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 181 

use of the word nervous, which we employ in speaking 
of a nervous grip, with the new pessimistic use of 
the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous 
manner. And as digestion is a good thing which 
sometimes goes wrong, as nerves are good things 
which sometimes go wrong, so existence itself in the 
eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a 
good thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held 
himself as free to draw his inspiration from the gift 
of good health as from the gift of learning or the 
gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were 
in life innumerable and varied, and that every man, 
or at least almost every man, possessed some window 
looking out on this essential excellence of things. 

Browning^s optimism then, since we must continue 
to use this somewhat inadequate word, was a result 
of experience — experience which is for some mysteri- 
ous reason generally understood in the sense of sad or 
disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuk- 
ing a little boy for eating apples in a tree is in the 
common conception the type of experience. If he really 
wished to be a type of experience he would climb up 
the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. 
Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, 
not in the sense that he selected his joyful experiences 
and ignored his painful ones, but in the sense that his 
joyful experiences selected themselves and stood out 
in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary 
intensity of colour. He did not use experience in 
that mean and pompous sense in which it is used by 
the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it 
in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is 
used at revivalist meetings. In the Salvation Army 



182 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

a man's experiences mean his experiences of the 
mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was 
much the same. But the revivalists' confessions 
deal mostly with experiences of prayer and praise; 
Browning's dealt pre-eminently with what may be 
called his own subject, the experiences of love. 

And this quality of Browning's optimism, the 
quality of detail, is also a very typical quality. 
Browning's optimism is of that ultimate and unshake- 
able order that is founded upon the absolute sight, 
and sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a 
man had gone up to Browning and asked him with all 
the solemnity of the eccentric, '^ Do you think life is 
worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what 
his answer might have been. If he had been for the 
moment under the influence of the orthodox rational- 
istic deism of the theologian he would have said, 
"Existence is justified by its manifest design, its 
manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other 
words, "Existence is justified by its completeness." 
If, on the other hand, he had been influenced by his 
own serious intellectual theories he would have said, 
" Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubt- 
fulness," or, in other words, "Existence is justified by 
its incompleteness." But if he had not been influenced 
in his answer either by the accepted opinions, or by 
his own opinions, but had simply answered the ques- 
tion " Is life worth living ? " with the real, vital answer 
that awaited it in his own soul, he would have said as 
likely as not, "Crimson toadstools in Hampshire." 
Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his mind 
would be his real verdict on what the universe had 
meant to him. To his traditions hope was traced to 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 183 

order, to his speculations hope was traced to disorder. 
But to Browning himself hope was traced to some- 
thing like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of 
that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower 
is symbolical of life ; it was rather of that deep and 
eternal type which believes that life, a mere abstrac- 
tion, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great 
concrete experiences which God made always come 
first; his own deductions and speculations about them 
always second. And in this point we find the real 
peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. 

One of the very few critics who seem to have got 
near to the actual secret of Browning's optimism is 
Mr. Santayana in his most interesting book Interpre- ] 
tations of Poetry and Religion. He, in contradistinction 
to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had dis- 
covered what was the real root virtue of Browning's 
poetry; and the curious thing is, that having dis- 
covered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. He 
describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the 
poetry of barbarism, by which he means the poetry 
which utters the primeval and indivisible emotions. 
" For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions 
as their own excuse for being, who does not domesti- 
cate them either by understanding their cause, or by 
conceiving their ideal goal." Whether this be or be 
not a good definition of the barbarian, it is an excellent 
and perfect definition of the poet. It might, perhaps, 
be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are 
generally highly traditional and respectable persons 
who would not put a feather wrong in their head-gear, 
aud who generally have very few feelings and think 
very little about those they have. It is when we have 



1B4 HOBERT BROWNING [chai». 

grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we 
begin to realise and put to ourselves intellectually the 
great feelings that sleep in the depths of us. Thus 
it is that the literature of our day has steadily 
advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we 
become more primeval as the world grows older until 
Whitman writes huge and chaotic psalms to express 
the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, and Maeter- 
linck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a 
child in the dark. 

Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable 
of all the Browning critics. He has gone out of his 
way to endeavour to realise what it is that repels 
him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault 
which none of Browning's opponents have discov- 
ered. And in this he has discovered the merit 
which none of Browning's admirers have discovered. 
Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, 
Mr. Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of 
Browning's poetry does rest upon primitive feeling ; 
and the only comment to be added is that so does the 
whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely 
with those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes 
which are the ultimate despots of existence. Poetry 
presents things as they are to our emotions, not as 
they are to any theory, however plausible, or any 
argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a 
glorious vision, poetry will say that it is a glorious 
vision, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to 
say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of sex. 
If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching 
thing, poetry will say that it is so, and no philo- 
sophers will persuade poetry to say that it is an 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 185 

evolutionary stage of great biological value. And here 
comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that 
it is perpetually challenging all systems with the test 
of a terrible sincerity. The practical value of poetry 
is that it is realistic upon a point upon which nothing 
else can be realistic, the point of the actual desires of 
man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is 
the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and 
therefore some parts of ethics are ugly. But all 
motives are beautiful, or present themselves for the 
moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is 
beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, 
with the shedding of blood for gold, it ought to suggest 
the gold as well as the blood. Only poetry can realise 
motives, because motives are all pictures of happiness. 
And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is 
this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which 
expresses beyond the power of rational statement a 
condition of mind, and all actions arise from a con- 
dition of mind. Prose can only use a large and 
clumsy notation ; it can only say that a man is miser- 
able, or that a man is happy ; it is forced to ignore 
that there are a million diverse kinds of misery 
and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry 
alone, with the first throb of its metre, can tell us 
whether the depression is the kind of depression that 
drives a man to suicide, or the kind of depression 
that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us 
whether the happiness is the happiness that sends 
a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller 
happiness that sends him to church. 

Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist 
lies in this that we have been examining, that beyond 



186 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

all his conclusions, and deeper than all his arguments, 
he was passionately interested in and in love with 
existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters 
of the earth run with blood, he would still have been 
interested in existence, if possible a little more soa He 
is a great poet of human joy for precisely the reason of 
which Mr. Santayana complains: that his happiness 
is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is 
something far more convincing, far more comforting, 
far more religiously significant than an optimist: he 
is a happy man. 

This happiness he finds, as all men must find happi- 
ness, in his own way. He does not find the great^ 
part of his joy in those matters in which most poets 
find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters in 
which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is 
to a considerable extent the poet of towns. " Do you 
care for nature much ? ^' a friend of his asked him. 
^' Yes, a great deal,'' he said, ^^ but for human beings 
a great deal more.'' Nature, with its splendid and 
soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most 
poets of the essential worthiness of things. There 
are few poets who, if they escaped from the rowdiest 
waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted again and 
exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The 
speciality of Browning is rather that he would have 
been quieted and exalted by the waggonette. 

To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all 
optimism, was to be found in the faces in the street. 
To him they were all masks of a deity, the heads 
of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one 
of them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, 
not looked upon by any other eyes. Each one of them 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 187 

wore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and 
eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other counte- 
nance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human 
difference was the deepest of all his senses. He was 
hungrily interested in all human things, but it would 
have been quite impossible to have said of him that he 
loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. 
His sense of the difference between one man and 
another would have made the thought of melting 
them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome 
and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing 
four hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture 
would not combine all, it would lose all. Browning 
believed that to every man that ever lived upon this 
earth had been given a definite and peculiar confi- 
dence of God. Each one of us was engaged on secret 
service ; each one of us had a peculiar message ; each 
one of us was the founder of a religion. Of that 
religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, 
our boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, 
were more or less fragmentary and inadequate ex- 
pressions. 

In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable 
man Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely 
significant and interesting anecdote about Browning, 
the point of which appears to have attracted very little 
attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John 
Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to 
his own adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, and 
Forster remarked, half jestingly, that he did not sup- 
pose that Browning would like him any the better for 
that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes 
with some astonishment. He immediately asked why 



188 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

Forster should suppose him hostile to the Koman 
Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost simultane- 
ously, by referring to '^ Bishop Blougram's Apology/' 
which had just appeared, and asking whether the por- 
trait of the sophistical and self-indulgent priest had 
not been intended for a satire on Cardinal Wiseman. 
'' Certainly,'^ replied Browning cheerfully, " I intended 
it for Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a 
satire, there is nothing hostile about it." This is the 
real truth which lies at the heart of what may be 
called the great sophistical monologues which Browning 
wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks 
upon their subjects, they are not even harsh and un- 
feeling exposures of them. They are defences ; they 
say or are intended to say the best that can be said for 
the persons with whom they deal. But very few people 
in this world would care to listen to the real defence 
of their own characters. The real defence, the defence 
which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make 
such damaging admissions, would clear away so many 
artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness 
and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood 
and censured by the world than exposed to that awful 
and merciless eulogy. One of the most practically 
difficult matters which arise from the code of manners 
and the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly 
justify a human being, because that justification would 
involve the admission of things which may not con- 
ventionally be admitted. We might explain and make 
human and respectable, for example, the conduct of 
some old fighting politician, who, for the good of his 
party and his country, acceded to measures of which 
he disapproved; but we cannot, because we are not 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 189 

allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of 
which he disapproved. We might touch the life of 
many dissolute public men with pathos, and a kind 
of defeated courage by telling the truth about the his- 
tory of their sins. But we should throw the world 
into an uproar if we hinted that they had any. Thus 
the decencies of civilisation do not merely make it 
impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to 
praise him. 

Browning, in such poems as " Bishop Blougram's 
Apology/^ breaks this first mask of goodness in order 
to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real 
goodness at last ; he dethrones a saint in order to 
humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the 
real optimism of Browning. And there is indeed little 
danger that such optimism will become weak and sen- 
timental and popular, the refuge of every idler, the 
excuse of every ne'er-do-weel. There is little danger 
that men will desire to excuse their souls before God 
by presenting themselves before men as such snobs as 
Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as Sludge the 
Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that 
is so stern as this optimism ; it is as merciless as the 
mercy of God. 

It is true that in this, as in almost everything else 
connected with Browning's character, the matter can- 
not be altogether exhausted by such a generalisation 
as the above. Browning's was a simple character, and 
therefore very difficult to understand, since it was 
impulsive, unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its 
moods. Probably in a great many cases, the original 
impulse which led Browning to plan a soliloquy was a 
kind of anger mixed with curiosity ; possibly the first 



190 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

charcoal sketch of Blougrain was a caricature of a 
priest. Browning, as we have said, had prejudices, 
and had a capacity for anger, and two of his angriest 
prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly- 
clericalism, and against almost every kind of spirit- 
ualism. But as he worked upon the portraits at least, 
a new spirit began to possess him, and he enjoyed 
every spirited and just defence the men could make 
of themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and 
towards the end would come the full revelation, and 
Browning would stand up in the man's skin and tes- 
tify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is 
worth while to notice one very curious error that has 
arisen in connection with one of the most famous of 
these monologues. 

When Eobert Browning was engaged in that some- 
what obscure quarrel with the spiritualist Home, it 
is generally and correctly stated that he gained a 
great number of the impressions which he afterwards 
embodied in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement 
so often made, particularly in the spiritualist accounts 
of the matter, that Browning himself is the original 
of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course 
merely an example of that reckless reading from which 
no one has suffered more than Browning, despite his 
students and societies. The man to whom Sludge 
addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. Horsfall, 
an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is 
more than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor 
is there the smallest reason to suppose that Sludge 
considered as an individual bears any particular resem- 
blance to Home considered as an individual. But 
without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 191 

statement of the view of spiritualism at which Brown- 
ing had arrived from his acquaintance w4th Home and 
Home's circle. And about that view of spiritualism 
there is something rather peculiar to notice. The 
poem, appearing as it did at the time when the in- 
tellectual public had just become conscious of the 
existence of spiritualism, attracted a great deal of 
attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. 
The spiritualists called down thunder upon the 
head of the poet, whom they depicted as a vulgar 
and ribald lampooner who had not only com- 
mitted the profanity of sneering at the mysteries 
of a higher state of life, but the more unpardonable 
profanity of sneering at the convictions of his own 
wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the 
poem with delight as a blasting exposure of spiritual- 
ism, and congratulated the poet on making himself 
the champion of the sane and scientific view of magic. 
Which of these two parties was right about the 
question of attacking the reality of spiritualism it is 
neither easy nor necessary to discuss. For the simple 
truth, which neither of the two parties and none of 
the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is 
that " Mr. Sludge the Medium '' is not an attack upon 
spiritualism. It would be a great deal nearer the 
truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it a 
justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of 
Browning's method is involved in this matter, and the 
whole essence of Browning's method is so vitally mis- 
understood that to say that " Mr. Sludge the Medium'' 
is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear 
on the face of it the appearance of the most empty 
and perverse of paradoxes. But so, when we have 



192 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be found 
to be. 

The general idea is that Browning must have in- 
tended " Sludge " for an attack on spiritual phenomena, 
because the medium in that poem is made a vulgar 
and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are 
quite openly confessed, and he himself put into every 
ignominious situation, detected, exposed, throttled, 
horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard this deduc- 
tion as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the 
very start of every poem that he ever wrote. There 
is nothing that the man loved more, nothing that 
deserves more emphatically to be called a speciality 
of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble 
truths by the lips of mean and grotesque human 
beings. In his poetry praise and wisdom were per- 
fected not only out of the mouths of babes and suck- 
lings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. 
Now what, as a matter of fact, is the outline and 
development of the poem of '' Sludge '^ ? The climax 
of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so fine 
that it is quite extraordinary that any one should 
have missed the point of it, since it is the whole point 
of the monologue. Sludge the Medium has been 
caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, a 
piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable 
explanation or palliation which will leave his moral 
character intact. He is therefore seized with a sudden 
resolution, partly angry, partly frightened, and partly 
humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to tell 
the whole truth about himself for the first time not 
only to his dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself 
for the earlier stages of the trickster's life by a survey 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 193 

of the border-land between trutb and fiction, not by 
any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a 
perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which 
does exist. There are some people who think that 
it must be immoral to admit that there are any 
doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain 
from discussing the precise boundary at the upper 
end of the Isthmus of Panama, for fear the inquiry 
should shake his belief in the existence of North 
America. People of this kind quite consistently think 
Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. 
It may be remembered that they thought the same 
thing of Newman. It is actually supposed, apparently 
in the current use of words, that casuistry is the 
name of a crime ; it does not appear to occur to 
people that casuistry is a science, and about as much 
a crime as botany. This tendency to casuistry in 
Browning's monologues has done much towards estab- 
lishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism 
which has done him so much harm. But casuistry 
in this sense is not a cold and analytical thing, but 
a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know what 
combinations of excuse might justify a man in man- 
slaughter or bigamy, is not to have a callous indiffer- 
ence to virtue; it is rather to have so ardent an 
admiration for virtue as to seek it in the remotest 
desert and the darkest incognito. 

This is emphatically the case with the question of 
truth and falsehood raised in ^^ Sludge the Medium.^' 
To say that it is sometimes difficult to tell at what 
point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state a 
cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human 
observation. To think that such a view involves the 



194 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. 

negation of honesty is like thinking that red is green, 
because the two fade into each other in the colours 
of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when 
we come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and 
when not it is permissible to create an illusion. A 
standing example, for instance, is the case of the fairy- 
tales. We think a father entirely pure and benevolent 
when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up 
into heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. 
We should consider that he lapsed from purity and 
benevolence if he told his children that in walking 
home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half- 
way up the church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a 
wheelbarrow. Again, few people would object to that 
general privilege whereby it is permitted to a person 
in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the 
climax by any exaggerative touches which really tend 
to bring it out. The reason of this is that the telling 
of the anecdote has become, like the telling of the 
fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation ; to offer 
to tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to 
recite or play the violin. No one denies that a fixed 
and genuine moral rule could be drawn up for these 
cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit, 
that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And 
when a man like Sludge traces much of his moral 
downfall to the indistinctness of the boundary and the 
possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance 
and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not 
possible to deny his right to be heard. 

We must recur, however, to the question of the main 
development of the Sludge self-analysis. He begins, 
as we have said, by urging a general excuse by the 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 195 

fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of 
telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympa- 
thisers and believers, he has slid into falsehood 
almost before he is aware of it. So far as this goes, 
there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed find 
himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact 
record of how true were the tales told about Con- 
servatives in an exclusive circle of Radicals, or the 
stories told about Radicals in a circle of indignant 
Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge 
goes on to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission 
of fraud : this principal feeling towards his victims is 
by his own confession a certain unfathomable contempt 
for people who are so easily taken in. He professes 
to know how to lay the foundations for every species 
of personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the 
slight and trivial slips of making Plato write Greek 
in naughts and crosses, 

'' As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do 
Before I found the useful book that knows." 

It would be difficult to imagine any figure more 
indecently confessional, more entirely devoid of not 
only any of the restraints of conscience, but of any 
of the restraints even of a wholesome personal con- 
ceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only 
fraud, but things which are to the natural man more 
difficult to confess even than fraud — effeminacy, 
futility, physical cowardice. And then, when the last 
of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has 
nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises 
up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the 
great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of 



196 EOBEKT BROWNINa [chap. 

the poem. He says in effect: ^^ Now that my interest 
in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to 
my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practised, 
now that I stand before you in a patent and open vil- 
lainy which has something of the disinterestedness and 
independence of the innocent, now I tell you with the 
full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe 
that there is something in spiritualism. In the course 
of a thousand conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand 
lies, I have discovered that there is really something 
in this matter that neither I nor any other man under- 
stands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of 
mankind, but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. 
I have seen too much for that.'^ This is the confession 
of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It would be 
difl&cult to imagine a confession of faith framed and 
presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a 
witness to his faith as the old martyrs were witnesses 
to their faith, but even more impressively. They 
testified to their religion even after they had lost their 
liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. 
Sludge testifies to his religion even after he has lost 
his dignity and his honour. 

It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary 
that any one should have failed to notice that this 
avowal on behalf of spiritualism is the pivot of the 
poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed clearly, 
but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical 
force : — 

*' Now for it, then ! Will you believe me, though ? 
You've heard what I confess : I don't unsay 
A single word : I cheated when I could, 
Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands to work. 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OP BROWNING 197 

Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink, 

Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosper-match, 

And all the rest ; believe that : believe this, 

By the same token, though it seem to set 

The crooked straight again, unsay the said, 

Stick up what I've knocked down ; I can't help that, 

It's truth ! I somehow vomit truth to-day. 

This trade of mine — I don't know, can't be sure 

But there was something in it, tricks and all ! " 

It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine 
a climax an attack on spiritualism. To miss that 
climax is like missing the last sentence in a good 
anecdote, or putting the last act of Othello into the 
middle of the play. Either the whole poem of 
" Sludge the Medium ^' means nothing at all, and is 
only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter is 
almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means 
this — that some real experiences of the unseen lie 
even at the heart of hypocrisy, and that even the 
spiritualist is at root spiritual. 

One curious theory which is common to most 
Browning critics is that Sludge must be intended 
for a pure and conscious impostor, because after his 
confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. 
Horsfall, he bursts out into horrible curses against 
that gentleman and cynical boasts of his future 
triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely this 
is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. 
A man driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate 
himself, and gain a certain sensation almost of lux- 
ury in that humiliation, in pouring out all his im- 
prisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it 
never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy 
man : he is a man who has devoted himself to a most 



198 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

delicate and arduous intellectual art in which he may 
achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight 
thrilling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for 
which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really- 
accomplished impostor is the most wretched of gen- 
iuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man 
might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his 
credit was gone, take a certain pleasure in rcTcaling the 
tricks of his unique trade, and gaining not indeed credit, 
but at least a kind of glory. And in the course of this 
self-revelation he would come at last upon that part 
of himself which exists in every man — that part which 
does believe in, and value, and worship something. 
This he would fling in his hearer's face with even 
greater pride, and take a delight in giving a kind of 
testimony to his religion which no man had ever given 
before — the testimony of a martyr who could not hope 
to be a saint. But surely all this sudden tempest of 
candour in the man would not mean that he would 
burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, 
like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The 
moment the danger was withdrawn, the sense of 
having given himself away, of having betrayed the 
secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an 
indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of 
rage. A man in such a case would do exactly as 
Sludge does. He would declare his own shame, de- 
clare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised 
what he had done, say something like this : — 

** R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard ! Cowardly scamp ! 
I only wish I dared burn down the house 
And spoil your sniggering ! " 

and so on, and so on. - 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 199 

He would react like this ; it is one of the most 
artistic strokes in Browning. But it does not prove 
that he was a hypocrite about spiritualism, or that he 
was speaking more truthfully in the second outburst 
than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary 
theory that a man is always speaking most truly when 
he is speaking most coarsely ? The truth about one- 
self is a very difficult thing to express, and coarse 
speaking will seldom do it. 

When we have grasped this point about "Sludge 
the Medium,^' we have grasped the key to the whole 
series of Browning^s casuistical monologues — Bishop 
Bloiigram' s Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwcmgaii, Fra 
Lippo Liijpi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes^ Apology, 
and several of the monologues in Tlie Ring and the 
Book. They are all, without exception, dominated by 
this one conception of a certain reality tangled almost 
inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind. And 
the peculiar fascination Avhich resides in the thought 
that the greatest lies about a man, and the greatest 
truths about him, may be found side by side in the 
same eloquent and sustained utterance. 

" For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." 

Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea 
of these poems is, that a man cannot help telling some 
truth even when he sets out to tell lies. If a man 
comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual 
motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there 
will yet be some point in the story where he will tell 
us about himself almost all that we require to know. 
If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the 
best examples of this general idea in Browning's 



200 EGBERT BROWNING [chap. 

monologues^ he may be recommended to notice one 
peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. 
As a whole, these apologies are written in a particu- 
larly burly and even brutal English. Browning's 
love of what is called the ugly is nowhere else so 
fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great 
many other things for which Browning as an artist is 
blamed, is perfectly appropriate to the theme. A vain, 
ill-mannered, and untrustworthy egotist, defending 
his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather- 
beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself 
best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate 
and without dignity. But the peculiarity of these 
loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now 
and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry 
which are like a burst of birds singing. Browning does 
not hesitate to put some of the most perfect lines that 
he or any one else have ever written in the English 
language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and 
Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, 
"Bishop Blougram's Apology.^' The poem is one of the 
most grotesque in the poet's works. It is intention- 
ally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician 
grossness of a grand dinner-party dt deux. It has 
many touches of an almost wild bathos, such as the 
young man who bears the impossible name of Gigadibs. 
The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for 
conformity, points out with truth that a condition 
of doubt is a condition that cuts both ways, and that 
if we cannot be sure of the religious theory of life, 
neither can we be sure of the material theory of life, 
and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncer- 
tainty continually shaken by a tormenting sugges- 



VIII.] THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 201 

tion. We cannot establish ourselves on rationalism, 
and make it bear fruit to us. Faith, itself is capable 
of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of 
doubts. Then comes the passage : — 

'* Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus ending from Euripides, — 
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
As old and new at once as Nature's self, 
To rap and knock and enter in our soul, 
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring. 
Round the ancient idol, on his base again, — 
The grand Perhaps ! " 

Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have 
been put into the mouth of Pompilia, or Eabbi Ben 
Ezra. It is in reality put into the mouth of a vulgar, 
fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice over 
the comfortable wine and the cigars. 

Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's 
knaves, must be reckoned another characteristic, their 
uniform tendency to theism. These loose and mean 
characters speak of many things feverishly and 
vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confi- 
dence and composure, their relation to God. It may 
seem strange at first sight that those who have out- 
lived the indulgence, not only of every law, but 
of every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so 
simply upon the indulgence of divine perfection. 
Thus Sludge is certain that his life of lies and con- 
juring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle 
obedience to the message really conveyed by the con- 
ditions created by God. Thus Bishop Blougram is 
certain that his life of panic-stricken and tottering 
compromise has been really justified as the only 



202 ROBERT BROWNING [chap. viii. 

method that could unite him with God. Thus Prince 
Hohenstiel-Schwangau is certain that every dodge in 
his thin string of political dodges has been the true 
means of realising what he believes to be the will of 
God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while 
admitting a failure in all things relative, claims an 
awful alliance with the Absolute. To many it will at 
first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, 
in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary 
doctrine, far less dangerous than its opposite. Every 
one on this earth should believe, amid whatever mad- 
ness or moral failure, that his life and temperament 
have some object on the earth. Every one on the 
earth should believe that he has something to give to 
the world which cannot otherwise be given. Every 
one should, for the good of men and the saving of 
his own soul, believe that it is possible, even if we 
are the enemies of the human race, to be the friends 
of God. The evil wrought by this mystical pride, 
great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil wrought 
by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of 
the devil who thinks himself of immeasurable value 
are as nothing to the crimes of the devil who thinks 
himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we 
have always this eternal interest, that they are real 
somewhere, and may at any moment begin to speak 
poetry. We are talking to a peevish and garrulous 
sneak ; we are watching the play of his paltry features, 
his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the 
face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like 
the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a 
common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is 
the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy. 



INDEX 



Agamemnon of ^schyluSf The, 

120. 
Alliance, The Holy, 89. 
'^Andrea del Sarto," 83. 
Aristophanes^ Apology ^ 120, 199. 
Arnold, Matthew, 41, 55, 56. 
Asolando, 132. 
Asolo (Italy), 42, 131. 
*' At the Mermaid,'' 117. 
Austria, 88, 89. 

B 

'* Bad Dreams," 138. 

Balaustion's Adventure, 119-120. 

Barrett, Arabella, 74, 119. 

Barrett, Edward Moulton, 58 se^., 
70, 73, 74, 76, 79. 

Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, 149. 

Bells and Pomegranates y 105. 

** Ben Ezra," 23, 201. 

Birrell, Mr. Augustine, 160. 

** Bishop Blougram," 51, 189. 

Bishop Blougram^s Apology ^ 188, 
189, 199, 200. 

Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A, 53. 

Boyd, Mr., 62. 

Browning, Robert : birth and fam- 
ily history, 3 ; theories as to his 
descent, 4-8 ; a typical English- 
man of the middle class, 9; his 
immediate ancestors, 10 seq. ; 
education, 12; boyhood and 
youth, 17; first poems, Incon- 
dita, 17; romantic spirit, 18; 

203 



publication of Pauli7ie, 20; 
friendship with literary men, 21 ; 
Paracelsus, 22; introduction to 
literary world, 25; his earliest 
admirers, 26; friendship with 
Carlyle, 26; Strafford, 27; Sor- 
dello, 34; Pippa Passes, 43; 
Dramatic Lyrics^ 45; The Re- 
turn of the Druses, 51; A Blot 
on the 'Scutcheon, 53; corre- 
spondence with Elizabeth Bar- 
rett, 62 seq. ; their first meeting, 
70 ; marriage and elopement, 78, 
79; life in Italy, 81 seq. ; love of 
Italy, 82, 85 seq. ; sympathy with 
Italian Revolution, 90; attitude 
towards spiritualism, 91 seq. 
113, 190-199; death of his wife 
103; returns to England, 105 
The Ring and the Book, 110 
culmination of his literary fame, 
110, 117; life in society, 110 
elected Fellow of Balliol, 117 
honoured by the great Univer- 
sities, 118 ; Balaustion's Adven- 
ture, 119-120 ; Aristophanes* 
Apology, 120; The Agamemnon 
of^schylus, 120 ; Prince Hohen- 
stiel-Schwangau, 121; Red-Cot- 
ton Night-Cap Country, 122; 
Fifine at the Fair, 124 ; The Inn 
Album, 125; Pacchiarotto, and 
Hoiv He Worked in Distemper, 
125 ; La Saisiaz, 127 ; The Two 
Poets of Croisic, 127 ; Dramatic 



204 



ROBERT BROV^NING 



Idijlls, 121 \ Jocoseria, 127; Fe- 
rishtah's Fancies, 127; Parley- 
ings with Certain People of 
Importance in their Day, 128; 
accepts post of Foreign Corre- 
spondent to the Royal Academy, 
129 ; goes to Llangollen with his 
sister, 130; last journey to Italy, 
130; death at Venice, 132; pub- 
lication of Asolando, 132; his 
conversation, 36; vanity, 33, 36; 
faults and virtues, 40, 55 ; his in- 
terest in Art, 82 seq. ; his varied 
accomplishments, 84-85 ; person- 
ality and presence, 18, 33, 112 
seq. ; his prejudices, 113-116; his 
occasional coarseness, 116; poli- 
tics, 86 seq. ; Browning as a 
father, 105 ; as dramatist, 52 ; as 
a literary artist, 133 seq. ; his 
use of the grotesque, 48, 140, 143, 
148 seq. ; his failures, 141 ; ar- 
tistic originality, 136, 143, 158; 
keen sense of melody and 
rhythm, 145 seq. ; ingenuity in 
rhyming, 152; his buffoonery, 
154; obscurity, 154 seq.\ his 
conception of the Universe, 175 ; 
philosophy, 177 seq. ; optimism, 
179 seq. ; his love poetry, 49; his 
knaves, 51, 201-202; the key to 
his casuistical monologues, 199. 

Browning, Life of (Mrs. Orr), 92. 

Browning, Robert (father of the 
poet), 10, 119. 

Browning, Mrs., n4e Wiedermann 
(mother), 11, 82. 

Browning, Anna (sister), 14, 105. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 
(wife), 57 seq., 91-99, 101, 103, 
116, 119, 129, 131. 

Browning Society, 129. 

Burns, Robert, 169-170. 

Byron, 11, 38, 141, 143. 

Byronism, 19, 117. 



*' Caliban,'' 9, 120. 

''Caliban upon Setebos,'' 93, 135, 

138. 
Camberwell, 3, 8, 19. 
*'Caponsacchi,'' 108. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 17, 26, 55, 

56, 87, 115. 
Carlyle, Mrs., 26. 
" Cavalier Tunes," 46. 
Cavour, 86, 90, 103. 
Charles I., 28, 29. 
Chaucer, 117. 
** Childe Roland to the Dark Tower 

came," 159. 
Christmas Eve, 105. 
Church in Italy, The, 88. 
"Clive," 127. 
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 56. 
Colombe's Birthday, 32. 
Corelli, Miss Marie, 38. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 73. 

D 

Darwin, 23, 39. 

Dickens, 16. 

''Djabal,"51, 52. 

Domett, Alfred, 21. 

"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archan- 

gelis," 161. 
Dramatic Idylls, 127. 
Dramatic Lyincs, 45-50. 
Dramatis Personas, 105. 
Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 187, 188. 

E 

Edinburgh Review, 122. 

*' Englishman in Italy, The," 150. 

F 

*' Fears and Scruples," 126, 138. 
"Ferishtah's Fancies," 138. 
Fiflne at the Fair, 9, 13, 51, 124, 

199. 
Fitzgerald, Edward, 116, 131. 



INDEX 



205 



Flight of the Duchess, The, 18. 

Florence, 81, 94. 

Forster, John, 26, 187, 188. 

Fox, Mr. Johnson, 20. 

Fox, Mrs. Bridell, 33. 

**Fra Lippo," 51. 

Fra Lippo Lippi, 83, 199. 

French Revolution, 87. 

Furnivall, Dr., 7, 129. 

G 

" Garden Fancies," 46. 
Garibaldi, 86, 89. 
Gilbert, W. S., 144. 
Gissing, Mr. George, 165. 
Gladstone, 117. 

(rolden Treasury (Palgrave), 168. 
Goldsmith, 169, 170. 
Gordon, General, 90. 
"Guido Franceschini, " 106, 120, 
200. 

H 

Henley, Mr., 148. 

** Heretic's Tragedy, The,'* 137. 

Hickey, Miss E. H., 129. 

** Holy Cross Day," 153. 

Home, David (spiritualist), 93-97, 

113, 190, 191. 
Home, David, Memoirs of, 93 

seq. 
Home, 26. 

Houghton, Lord, 129. 
"House," 138. 
''Householder, The," 138. 
** How they brought the good News 

from Ghent to Aix," 46. 
Hudihras (Butler), 57. 
Hugo, Victor, 17. 
Hunt, Leigh, 26. 



Incondita, 17. 

Inn Album, The, 125. 

Instans Tyrannus, 9. 



Italy, 85 seq. 

Italian Revolution, 88 seq. 

** Ivan Ivanovitch," 127. 



Jameson, Mrs., 75. 

Jerrold, Douglas, 34. 

Jocoseria, 127. 

Jowett, Dr., 118. 

Julius Csesar (Shakespeare), 28. 

" Juris Doctor Bottinius," 161. 

K 

Keats, 15, 16, 19, 137, 142. 
Kenyon, Mr., 22, 58, 69-70, 74, 76. 
King Victor and King Charles, 32. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 142. 
Kirkup, Seymour, 103. 



UAiglon, 28. 

"Laboratory, The," 47, 143. 

Landor, 26, 56, 93, 101-103. 

La Saisiaz, 127. 

Letters, The Browning, 63. 

Liberalism, 86. 

' ' Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," 131. 

Llangollen, 130. 

Lockhart, 112. 

" Lost Leader, The," 46. 

" Lover's Quarrel, A," 50. 

"Luigi,"45. 

Lytton, Lord (novelist), 91. 

M 

Macready, 17, 27, 53. 

Maeterlinck, 164, 184. 

Manning, Cardinal, 91. 

Mary Queen of Scots, 29. 

" Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,*' 

147. 
" May and Death," 21. 
Mazzini, 89. 
Men and Women, 105. 
Meredith, George, 156, 165. 



206 



KOBEET BROWNING 



Mill, Jobn Stuart, 26, 56. 

Milsand, 119. 

Milton, 137. 

Monckton Milnes, 26, 100. 

Mr. Sludge the Medium^ 82, 96, 

120, 190-199. 
" Muleykeh," 127. 
*' My Star/' 138. 

N 

Napoleon, 42, 89. 
Napoleon III, 56, 92, 121. 
"Nationality in Drinks," 46, 138. 
'' Never the Time and the Place," 

127. 
Newman, Cardinal, 193. 
Norwood, 18. 

O 

**Ode on the Intimations of Im- 
mortality " (Wordsworth), 136. 

** Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), 
137. 

** Old Masters in Florence," 177. 

*' One Word More," 65. 

Orr, Mrs., 72. 



Pacchiarotto, and Hoio He Worked 
in Distemper, 125, 126, 152. 

Paracelsus, 22, 25, 26, 41, 47, 158. 

"Paracelsus," 24, 25. 

Painting, Poems on, 83. 

Palgrave, Francis, 117. 

Paris, 94. 

Parleyings with Certain Persons 
of Importance in their Day, 22, 
128, 158. 

Pauline, 20, 21, 37, 41, 51. 

"Pheidippides," 127. 

Phelps (actor) , 53. 

" Pictor Ignotus," 83. 

" Pied Piper of Hamelin, The," 153. 

*'Pippa,"45, 120. 

Pippa Passes, 18, 45, 47, 51, 137. 



Pisa, 81. 

Pius IX, Church under, 88. 

Plato, 21, 23. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 144. 

Poetry, Pessimistic school of, 130. 

** Pompilia," 201. 

Pope, 11, 20, 57. 

" Portrait, A," 138. 

Prince Hohenstiel - SchxoangaUy 

121-122. 
Princess, The (Tennyson), 148. 
" Prometheus Unbound ' ' (Shelley) , 

137. 
Prussia, 88, 89. 
Puritans, 30. 
Pym, 28, 30. 

R 

'* Rabbi Ben Ezra," 201. 
Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country^ 

122-124. 
Return of the Druses, The, 51-53. 
Revolution, The French, 15 ; Italian 

90. 
Ring and the Book, The, 85, 106, 

109, 123, 137, 160-176. 
Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, 22, 93. 
Roman Church, 114, 187, 188. 
Rossetti, 163. 
Royalists, 30. 
Ruskin, 16, 55, 56, 91, 115. 
Russia, 88. 

S 

Sand, George, 9, 94. 

Santayana's, Mr., Interpretations 

of Poetry and Religion, 183-186. 
*' Sebald," 45. 
Shakespeare, 17, 57. 
Shakespeare Society, 129. 
Sharp, Mr. William, 133. 
Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 165. 
Shelley, 15, 16, 17, 19. 56, 136, 141, 

143. 
"Shop," 138. 



INDEX 



207 



" Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," 

138. 
Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), 

21. 
** Sludge," 51, 52, 150, 189, 200. 
Smith, Elder (publishers), 110. 
*' Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, 

The," 47. 
** Sonnets from the Portuguese," 

65. X 
Sordello, 23, 34, 42. 
Speech, Free, 173. 
Spenser, 142. 

Spiritualism, 9, 91, 113, 190. 
"Statue and the Bust, The," 

109. 
Sterne, 117. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60, 114. 
Strafford, Ti seq., .37. 
Swinburne, 56, 116, 142, 143. 



Taifs Magazine, 20. 
Talfourd, Sergeant, 26. 
Tennyson, 27, 34, 55, 117, 141, 142, 

143, 148. 
Thackeray, Miss, 123. 
'* Through the Metidja to Abd-el- 

Kaar," 46. 
Time's Revenges^ 9, 93. 
Tolstoi, 115. 



Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 163. 
Two Poets of Croisic, The, 127. 

U 

University College, 14. 
"Up jumped Tokay" (poem 
quoted), 140. 



Venice, 131. 

Victor of Sardinia, King, 23. 

Vogler, Abt, 23. 

W 

Water Babies (Kingsley) , 8. 
Watts, Mr. G. F., 112. 
Whitman, Walt, 21, 43, 49, 114, 

165, 184. 
*'Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), 

86. 
Wiedermann, William, 12. 
Wiseman, Cardinal, 188. 
Wimbledon Common, 18. 
Wordsworth, 69, 136, 141, 143. 
Wordsworth Society, 129. 



" Youth and Art," 50, 109. 

Z 

Zola, 164. 



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